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...

I am a Midwestern WASP who has spent time on the East Coast. In 1997 my grandfather died of Parkinson’s Disease. These two facts made me feel right at home with the 2001 novel The Corrections. So when I learned Jonathan Franzen would be guest lecturing during a class at my MFA program, I smiled as if being ticked – I couldn’t help but be happy. Imagine my bewilderment, then, when I watched the hazing of Franzen. The man is...

I was waiting yesterday to board a plane in Minneapolis, doing yoga in an alcove. If you were passing through and noticed a new age weirdo stretching into Ardha Chandrasana, I too am just trying to make it all work—a weekend conference interspersed with paper-grading, knees at right angles to the seat back in front of me, retreating into the solace of earbuds. But during the layover, I took the arch of my foot in hand, and listened to the...

I offer David Rivard’s new collection of poems Otherwise Elsewhere from Graywolf Press as part of a 6-step recovery program (yes, we poet-types are a bit too lazy for the usual twelve) on how to hazard wisdom in an age of the poetically glib: Use their words with impunity; hack them to deep rooted stumps that catch in the throat. Find a convincing swagger before breaking into a giddy song and dance number. If squeamish about the...