Indiana, Where Art Thou?
No, I’m thinking of mythology, that America of Madison Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, the Alamo and Antietam. In this spiritual landscape, Indiana isn’t misunderstood. It’s ignored. Over at Electric Literature,…
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Guia Cortassa
474 posts
Jessie Glenn is an essayist primarily focused on parenting and taboo. Their exposé about MasterChef was "Best of 2018" in Salon Magazine. They’ve also had essays in NYT Modern Love, Washington Post, Cleaver, Toronto Star, and elsewhere. They are currently writing a memoir. Glenn teaches book publicity at Portland State University in the Master’s of Publishing Program. Jessie and spouse have a blended family with five children.
Literary Tripping
All of which adds up to a place that produces writers the way France produces cheese — prodigiously, and with world-class excellence — a place that calls on its writers’…
Speculating in Bangkok
Yet the more I imagined this scene, the more I had read between the novels of Bukowski’s lowly dredge through life and Dick’s mind-bending canon of science fiction, I began…
Repressed Reading
That night, I found myself seriously questioning this assumption I’d held since childhood: “You have to try to forget that while you’re reading.” You do? Why? And, more to the…
The Eye of the Writer
She sent me this photograph and wrote: I run across my own life as a dog runs across a field, zigzag. The search is endless. Then I come to a…
Iowa’s Ring of Fire
“One day,” he said, “you’re going to have a bad time in workshop. A really bad time. Maybe Frank is in a foul mood and you’ve pissed off a few…
Riding With the Queen
Over at the New York Times, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah profiles Toni Morrison in a tremendous essay: Morrison is a woman of guardrails and many boundaries; she keeps them up in…
Unlike Friends
All we knew was that Casper, with his genius IQ, his measured laugh, his wicked weltanschauung, was somebody really, really interesting to hang out with. A neighborhood kid like anybody…
Tautophrases and Narcissism
In a world where the selfie has become our dominant art form, tautological phrases like “You do you” and its tribe provide a philosophical scaffolding for our ever-evolving, ever more…
Friends Indeed
Well, one of things we have in common as writers is that we don’t work too much from personal experience. So, I feel like there’s a constant desire for readers…
Writing War From Afar
It was a really big deal for me that a Sri Lankan publisher picked it up. I didn’t grow up there, and I didn’t go through [the war], so there’s…
Teaching German During the Arab Spring
Where am I from, ask the Arabs: “Woher kommen Sie, Sai-ed Maruan,” and I answer that I’m from Germany, but that I’m also from Palestine. Had I ever been to…