Features & Reviews
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A Consideration of “Vanya”
Except that Andrew Scott plays all eight characters. A page in the playbill explains that the one-man-show idea occurred accidentally during readings of Stephens’ straight version. ‘It turns out when one person [does it], when there was one voice,’ Scott…
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Memoir to Novel, Sister Texts: A Conversation with T Kira Māhealani Madden
“I look at the paragraph as its own little work of music. I need to make sure the repetition, any sort of rhyme scheme, meter, consecution – everything needs to be clicking within the paragraph form. Sometimes that alters the…
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Satire as Anxiety Release and Reclaiming Narrative: A Conversation with Jordy Rosenberg
“Horror and satire are incredibly proximate genres. They both nourish the over-excitement of the reader—either through terror or laughter, or both—which I was hoping to do. Sometimes these are the only genres that are allowed to tell the truth about…
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Listening to Ghosts, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and the Ethics of Remembering
Toni Morrison’s Beloved arrives at its reader with the economy of a hush and the force of a storm. It is an argument written in the grammar of ghosts: sentences that are at once precise and porous, voices braided together…
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The First Book: Mariah Rigg
“Rejection can sometimes open doors to new ways of telling stories, comparison will only stagnate your writing. It will turn you away from the work that you need to create, the work that is entirely yours, and have you trying…
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Walking as a Pastime: Jason Allen-Paisant’s “Thinking with Trees”
Despite his struggle to assert himself, to feel belongingness in his adopted home, the poet concludes the collection with defiance and hope. In “Fear of Men,” he questions whether he must imagine “the trees dark at night” or “silhouettes rising,…
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The First Book: Eliana Ramage
‘You will write other novels…’ I find it affirming because (1) it quiets the worry that the first book has to say or hold everything, which no book can or should, (2) the word write.”
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Autobiomythography or Attending to What Memoir Excises: A Conversation with Lana Lin
My artistic practice includes making films, writing, and visual art. It’s driven by the same kinds of concerns around race, identity, and self-expression—and what it means to speak or to say something. In an interview [about] Dorothy, a publishing project,…
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In Praise of Difficulty & Reading Toni Morrison: A Conversation with Namwali Serpell
“She saw the readers as a chorus, like the chorus in a Greek play, where the audience is part of the ensemble. She gives the example of when you’re in an audience in a musical performance—you’re shouting, clapping, and stomping…
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The Inheritance of Grief and Work: Abbie Kiefer’s “Certain Shelter”
Shelter becomes manifest for the speaker through place, particularly in towns devastated by the loss of industry. Through the setting of small-town Maine, Kiefer examines the way life is transformed after the closing of a town mill, and even more…
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The Strangest Sky Home Lost and Found in Leo Boix’s “Southernmost: Sonnets”
In his latest collection of poetry, Boix ushers readers into the halls of his personal museum, inviting us to peer within and peruse the memories and artifacts carefully numbered and ordered into the rhymes and lines of sonnets
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Connections and Community: An Interview with Patricia Henley
“It is a writerly habit to notice all the small and large things that comprise characters or potential characters. By the time they reach the page, I may not even recall the source of a snippet of dialogue or a…