While Edith Wharton had the good fortune to be born into a family of privilege, her native intelligence was another lucky card she drew from the pile that is a person’s intended lot in life. Rebecca Mead’s article about Wharton’s letters to her German governess, Anna Bahlmann, appeared in the June 29th issue of The […]
Writing
Mark McGurl’s “The Program Era”
Mark McGurl (Photo by Kevin Scanlon) Louis Menand has written a provocative piece in this week’s New Yorker magazine that asks the question, should creative writing be taught? And perhaps even more importantly, can it be taught? His discussion wraps itself around a new book by Mark McGurl called The Program Era which is definitely […]
Bird Flight
My clever and resourceful friend at Virgin in the Volcano sent me an extraordinary story by Andre Dubus, A Father’s Story. It is deeply memorable and haunting, and you can read it in its entirety here. As for this moment, I’ve included a few salient passages from the story that have sat with me all […]
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Going to the Mat To Move Someone
It keeps happening. I keep finding parallels in visual art with the way poets and writers talk about their process. While most art makers have their own “narrative” of what is going on and how their work comes into being that could be questioned as a kind of handy fiction all its own, I still […]
Flannery O’Connor: Experienced Meaning
Photo: Jay:Leviton-Atlanta I have had a long fascination with Flannery O’Connor, the quirky, brilliant, lupus-suffering author who died way too young. She attended the Writer’s Workshop in Iowa even though she “didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper,” and went on to be a star who “scared the boys to death […]
Adieu Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton’s death this past week seems to have been lost in the protracted celebration around Obama’s victory, but his passing is worthy of a pause. I was never a big fan of his novels but like many other culture watchers, have been flabbergasted by the prodigious scope of his interests, intellect and output. I […]
- Creativity
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Seven Metaphors
Wise man and friend D, author of the Joe Felso: Ruminations blog, had a posting this weekend that is so good it can’t be paraphrased. Rather than sending you there (although it would be time well spent since this is just one of many thought-provoking posts), I’ll make it easy and include the full text […]
River Bed, Exposed
I’ve been in my studio all week, doing very little in the way of art making. In my vigil of just sitting, I have pondered this question: How is it that a juicy, lush stream of creative expression can dry up and disappear overnight? What is the fragile chemistry of the brain or the body […]
More than Meaning
One of the reasons I get rather depressed by the current fad for documentary style fiction, is its insistence on the explanatory above the symbolic. Good writing goes beyond its subject matter. Language is more than meaning. The things that we have read that we remember seem to move with us through our lives as […]
The Constant Flicker of Different and Self-Cancelling Perceptions
J. M. Coetzee. I am in awe of his work, even though its textures, angles and palettes are so different from my own creative matrix. In a very readable New Yorker review by James Wood of Coetzee’s new book Diary of a Bad Year, I found a few passages that are just too good to […]