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It Has To Do With Attention
Q: What is the difference between a poem and a cloud? A: Not very much, according to the poet Mary Ruefle in this (delightful) interview, found in Music & Literature: The clouds are written to us, as we are the only ones to receive them, we the living. And what are poems but weather reports? Is there a difference…
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VIDA Launches Roundtable Discussion Series
VIDA is launching a new roundtable discussion series on issues in writing by women on June 2nd at Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan. The event is the first of a series that will take place every fall and winter/spring. This time, they conversation centers on how women write about other women, featuring a panel including Jill Lepore, Rebecca…
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Lightning and Lawn Debris
No spoilers here, but Patricia Lockwood’s new poetry collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is garnering significant praise. In the New York Times, Dwight Garner writes that: Patricia Lockwood’s sexy, surreal and mostly sublime poems seem to have been, as James Joyce said in “Ulysses” about a batch of folk tales, “printed by the weird sisters in the year…
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WWNBD: What Would Nellie Bly Do?
Two things: First, Alice Gregory’s fascinating account of Nellie Bly’s bold, perennially wry career in journalism—an account that wraps up with a call for female writers to not only write about “women’s issues.” Second, Ann Friedman responds with a thoughtful defense of making a career writing about “women’s issues.”
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“How do we access what we cannot know?”
A book of poetry wrangling with your complicated Southern genealogy: this, by definition, is a complicated endeavor. The Forage House, Tess Taylor’s debut book of poetry, finds the author doing just that. The Oxford American talks to her about what that was like: A lot of these poems are a kind of anti-reporting. They’re a record of the places where…
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East Egg, West Egg, Deviled Egg
Besotted by over-saturated news feeds, sometimes, you may just want to read vignettes about the more precocious members of the egg family; for this, we have Sadie Stein. Three Stories about Deviled Eggs, over at the Paris Review: Life had changed; suddenly deviled eggs were everywhere—at tapas bars, in sepia-toned Brooklyn whiskey joints. I, too, was jaded;…
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An Army of Readers
The more tools that we get for communication and collaboration, the more we’re taking reading and writing — these really solitary pursuits — and building communities around them for connection and conversation. Rachel Fershleiser gives a smashing TED Talk about John Green, non-profit budgets, and how the Internet has given shape to a community of…
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Last Rain
Every holiday has its parallel griefs, as much for what isn’t present as for what is. In the New Yorker, Ruth Margalit writes beautifully about experiencing Mother’s Day, after her mother is gone: Meghan O’Rourke has a wonderful word for the club of those without mothers. She calls us not motherless but unmothered. It feels right—an ontological…
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“I knew from the beginning I wanted to tell the story”
It’s been a big week—no, month—no, year—for Rumpus Essays Editor Roxanne Gay, who has two books coming out this summer, both of which have already been widely praised. Yesterday, Gay talked with Rumpus contributor Sari Botton at a Vol. 1 Brooklyn event at Community Bookstore. English Kills Review details the conversation.
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One Hundred Years of Dublin
Gather round, ye James Joyce devotees: Mark O’Connell has an essay (replete with some pretty nifty info-graphics) up at Salon on the Dublin of the past and present: Everyone in Dubliners is thinking about a way out, if not actively pursuing one; everyone is dreaming of some better version of himself in some better place. The stories are filled with vague conjurings of…
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Boa Constrictor in the Derby Hat
The Little Prince is one of those books which just as easily affects adults as children, and it’s hard to go long without encountering it. Still, the story remains a bit of a mystery. In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik tries to solve bits of it: For all of the Prince’s journey is a journey of exile,…
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Race, Power, Publishing
The disproportionally white publishing industry matters because agents and editors stand between writers and readers. Anika Noni Rose put it perfectly in Vanity Fair this month: “There are so many writers of color out there, and often what they get when they bring their books to their editors, they say, ‘We don’t relate to the character.’ Well it’s…