I received Hannah Tinti’s gem of a novel, The Good Thief, in the mail as a free gift from the literary journal One Story, along with an invitation to what sounded like a really awesome AWP Conference event. (If you aren’t a One Story subscriber, do it. They’re great, and every three weeks you’ll get a single excellent story in chapbook form sent to you in the mail.) Having finished Tinti’s novel several days...

It starts at the local Walgreens. I am buying toothpaste and some bottled water to drink on my walk home. Waiting in line, I see these mini-pens, the kind that would fit perfectly in a shirt pocket with a small notepad, a little writerly touch to make me feel better about things. I put it on the counter with the water and toothpaste. “Oops, someone left a pen,” the cashier says. “Oh no,” I say. “I intend to make that mine.” ...

I should write short stories. I keep at this novel ambition while I have yet to produce anything other than pieces of one that please me.  Walk to run to fly. That kind of thing. I haven’t written one in some time. When I did, it was from the perspective of a young black man. I am not joking. It all started when a teacher at grad school, the estimable Colum McCann, gave me one of his savory, lilting maxims. He said something like,...

When depressed, and I mean clinically depressed, which means melancholy for no reason, numbness that few know, I get my best thinking done about creativity and nothing else. Judgment otherwise impaired allows me to see the darkness of what needs to fade away. In this sense a sort of insanity does provide a certain advantage, in that I am savagely self-critical and able to employ the shit detector. I write a lot of shit, so this comes in...

I am currently teaching Introduction to Creative Writing. Coming down the home stretch of the semester, we’re on nonfiction, and for it I am using, for the first time, David Starkey’s Four Genres in Brief. In it, Brian Doyle speaks of the challenge of wresting an essay free from “the stench of ego.” Philip Lopate says personal essays thrive on littleness, especially “self-belittlement.” From what I’ve found,...

11. David Abram’s Becoming Animal:An Earthly Cosmology. Pg. 37 of 313. I bought this one for the cover. Not always a good start, but I’ve had luck with this before.  The interesting thing is that what I did read of this book had a profound effect on my worldview, and this, I think, was the root of its inevitable undoing.  Once I grasped the thesis, which was an affirmation of my own stirring discontent with metaphysics, I...

Writing school means writing workshops. This involves giving a story to everyone in a class full of writing students, as well as the instructor, and asking for their feedback. When I was first writing, I was against the fundamental philosophy underlying such coursework. I believed that writers should be despots, utterly free of criticism and in total control of a given piece.  When I switched my major to creative writing, however, such...

In Lia Purpura’s On Looking, a collection of essays by a talented lyricist, we find such dense music as “the first hard crack against quartz,” and such rich story as: Here, gathered on the porch with us, you’re staying with that gash of a moment, you’re holding, somewhere, a starkness few will let a moment turn to. You’re turning the moment in your hands, you’re offering it so it breaks in the light and...

A few great interview clips and some sage writing advice from the talented Jennifer Egan, courtesy of The Daily Beast. Check it out...

To kick off my year of 100 books, I started with Margaret Atwood‘s brilliant work of speculative fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale. I’d like to say that I elected to start with this book because I’m probably the last person on Earth to have read it or because my husband has been very nicely asking me to read it for at least a year. The truth is, it was the first one on top of the giant pile of unread books I pulled...