How riveting was Game of Thrones last night? We saw Bran have a dream, talk to Osha, and walk. We saw Jon talk to Mance Rayder and walk. Arya and her rag tags walk, get captured, talk to their captors, and then walk some more. Sansa eats lemon cakes (is that the only pastry in Westeros?) and talks to an old woman. By the time we got to see Joffrey look at fabric samples and explain the mechanics of a crossbow, I was already on the edge of...

“What a strange thing! to be alive beneath cherry blossoms.” ― Kobayashi Issa, Poems As of March 20th, we have officially entered the spring season. And while it is still disarmingly chilly and dreary in the northeast portion of the United States that I roam, the beginning buds in the trees and points of crocuses sticking up from the ground indicate that indeed warmer, longer and brighter days are ahead. It is this optimism that I...

The New York Times reports on a new study showing that high-achieving, working-class students are shunning elite schools (an unnamed list of “the 238 most selective colleges”) in favor of regional universities and community colleges. The study finds that many such students are unaware of these elite colleges, since they’re not likely to have met anyone who has attended such a place and, presumably, were not raised with the expectation...

Over the last few nights, half-longing for sleep, I've seen Lisa as she was at 14, the two of us almost side by side, about to take the front steps of East Hampton High School for the first time.

The world we are born into is not the one we leave. Mary Ruefle: Madness, Rack, and Honey, 243, 2012. 1938′s Marie Antoinette burbles up another ball scene on the television aspark in a corner of the bedroom, the one to the right of the wall of windows looking out, if windows, like eyes, could look out, on the red-bricked junior high school shut because of too many lousy student/teacher performances. Noah sees that I am busy at what...

Dr Siegel says You’ve tested negative, and you imagine that the hook hidden in his mouth pierces through each word: his bottom lip sticks against his teeth on negative, as though he could hardly bear to let it go. But Dr. Siegel is like that with words. You remember–when you came before–the particular kind of quiet with which he met your nodding at his Harvard and Columbia degrees, while the swimming...

An agent friend of mine told me long ago that the best way to learn how to write well was to “read well” – meaning read quality stories, books, perhaps even recipes with nutritious ingredients rather than artificial additives. Unfortunately, I took this advice as the agent “stating the obvious,” thinking it impossible not to read good work without taking some good for it, both as a person and a writer (I think there is a...

So, when I wrote on reading drama, I was perhaps too optimistic. When I said that drama is a break from prose fiction and that it can be read more quickly, I didn’t take into account that drama, like, I suppose, all genres, can get repetitive. I made the mistake of reading only one author, a volume of six plays by Ibsen; they’re brilliant, but once you read one play about boring middle-class life, your first response is rarely to go out...

In his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen gives a scathing indictment of the brave new world of the internet, arguing that user-created content is lowering the standard and preventing true talent from rising above the tide of garbage. His predictions are nothing if not apocalyptic: he pictures a world where newspapers go under to HuffPo, recording companies crushed by YouTube, and the end of literature brought about by blogs. Also, I...

San Pedro River Review is a semi-annual print journal of poetry and art.