Nothing kills dreamers quicker than the idea of truth. The assertion that there is one reality is killing unmarketable forms of expression through painful division. Imaginative writing is that casualty. So many times I’ve heard “I don’t read fiction” or “I don’t read poetry.” Real life accounts of actual events sell well through the dubious notion that truth is truer than art. The truth is an...

When I encounter the occasional meditation or tome on the connection between madness and creativity, I become wary and weary. I don’t even bother to concern myself with opinions of those who have no history of mental illness, as I consider a history of mental illness to be inevitable in any critical mind. But if the work is written by someone who has known only anxiety or depression, I am less likely to connect with the work...

If I just hold on, I might be that man who awoke three hours later and helmed the ship for a captain with hypothermia, one who found courage to scream at the storm while slammed by the waves, throwing a voice almost impossible to hear but there, and urgent, and powering through the noise of the city or the sea.

This is an account of a disastrous sailing trip Dylan James Brock took in June 2011. View Part 1 here 2 Before the captain bought the forty-one foot sailboat in May 2011, it was owned by a hoarder. Lucille crammed every corner of the boat’s two cabins with assorted trinkets that the captain had cleared out over the course of a few days. All he had chosen to keep  of the clutter was a drawer full of brand new, blank baseball caps,...

I have often found myself wishing my life were dramatic enough to make a great narrative. Moments in it were that way, but only to the extent that they offered material for a self-indulgent, episodic piece or two. Until recently, there had been no great adventure to my tale that could hold the threads together long enough for me to weave them into a tapestry. That all changed on my recent vacation. I was asked to sail from Rochester, New...

I went to my first reading in early 2001. In general I was a cocky little shit back then. I still believed that I was destined to win the Nobel Prize. I would surely have been committed for grandiose delusions if I sat down across from a psychiatrist in a bad mood. The reading was for some hotshot neophyte named Dave Eggers. I was unimpressed. The writer kept referring to something called “McSweenys.net” as if it were...

I didn’t take my first writer’s workshop until I was a fifth-year junior at University of Michigan. I did not take to them right away. I had never faced the sadomasochistic barrage that is a session of such a class. There seemed to be no correlation between talent and vileness. Being able to do something and being able to help someone else do likewise are disparate talents rarely joined in an individual. So it was that one of...

For a long time I thought writing was all about the inspiration of the first draft. There is something to this idea. A turd cannot be made a diamond through polish. We used to call them that in grad school. Polished Turds. PTs. I have crafted my share with the anus end of my mind and left them on the table just stinking and demanding something be done about them. Still, something that seems to be a turd can at times be just a dirty gem....

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,...