While the past month has been quite a busy one for the Clarity, I’m extremely pleased with the scope and depth of the issue we’ve put together for April. Included in our latest offering: One of Ryan’s and my most beloved television actors, John Dunsworth of Trailer Park Boys, stops by to decry (extensively) the state of contemporary politics and discuss inebriation; Fred Thomas records an entrancing new studio session;...

And to be moved by the stars was to have one’s soul stirred by some divinely wrought swizzle   A thought does not have to be thought. In fact, a thought is not—as we thought, a product of the reasoning mind. The mind is a collection. Merely and as much. Infinite, given that even the finger that traces a line in The Poetics of Trespass, follows a path that is nowhere, and is endless. A passage among passages, a project of...

A recent collaboration I was commissioned by Mark DeCarteret to do for his as-yet-unpublished novel, Off-Season. This extraordinary novel, set in the gaudy squalor of Seatown, can be found excerpted at Word Riot.  Where are the brave publishers out there willing to take on literature that does more than attempt a “deceptive simplicity?”   Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio...

My grandfather is a published writer of mystery novels, and he once gave me a bit of advice that is something special to me: when a story has a twist ending, the twist has to make everything make more sense, rather than less. We call him Bampa in our family because of a mispronunciation of his name by my oldest sibling. Bampa taught me something else, for better or worse. He taught me that the life of a writer is best lived so as to make...

For a semester I took a class from a man who seemed to dislike me on sight, the writer Colson Whitehead. I was told he had  MacArthur genius grant and so I had high expectations going in.  Such status is almost on the level of Nobel prize and I came in thinking highly of man knowing only his writing. The first session we had with him, he started off by saying he would tell us something about himself, and then it would go the next person,...

When living in New York City, I met many writers. Some came into my MFA program, some I already knew, and some I just happened to meet. Advice of theirs sticks to me, all of it, but there are certain bits that haunt me. Two of these persistent thoughts came when I did not expect them. Through friends and friends of friends, I ended up going out to breakfast with a screenwriter. He looked young, was no more than thirty, but seemed to be...

Sometimes a writer comes to a crossroads that causes her to pose a question she never really asked before. Until that moment the answer was assumed, implied in the act of writing. Thus, the asking must indicate an interruption, however brief. Pause gives space to deem it—a thought bubble tossing on an opalescent sea. Writing is an act and a meditation—the friction that not only the product of writing differs, but both means and agent,...

Songwriter Jose Gonzalez calls in from Sweden to discuss his life and work.

It’s after a couple sets of tennis. My friend Peter says he believes that Big Foot exists, something about how Jane Goodall thought so too. We’re sitting down on a bench, and I’m not ready for this. He hates the middle class. That’s his big one. That and physics. How everything is motion and anyone who says otherwise is full of crap. Anyway, the Big Foot thing caught me a little. Something keeps me from asking if he’s...

I’m writing jokes these days, as in: How many Lutherans does it take to change a lightbulb? Lutherans don’t change lightbulbs; they reform them. I started writing them after we read Mimi Schwartz’s essay “Elegy for an Optimist” in my Intro. to Creative Writing Class. It’s an illuminating downer–about Schwartz’s father-in-law who suffered too much and too long due to those dogged physicians who...