Henry David Thoreau
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The Present in Its Most Vivid Colors: A Conversation with Ben Shattuck
What does a growth of new grass on a hillside in spring make you feel? Is it a mixture of nostalgia and hope? Or what does a distant mountain range wreathed in a crown of clouds make you feel?
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Beauty in a Cold Season: Katherine May’s Wintering
As we go, we are breathlessly held in an in-between state, a limbo, a transition.
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Silence Is the Fertile Field: Talking with Fenton Johnson
Fenton Johnson discusses his new book, AT THE CENTER OF ALL BEAUTY.
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Love and Loss in the Time of Pandemics: Talking with Paul Lisicky
Paul Lisicky discusses his new memoir, LATER: MY LIFE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD.
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Into Unbound Space: Talking with Seth Rogoff
Seth Rogoff discusses his novels FIRST, THE RAVEN: A PREFACE and THIN RISING VAPORS.
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A Way to Make Sense of the World with Suzanne Buffam
Poet Suzanne Buffam discusses her latest work, A Pillow Book, sleep remedies that don’t work, and the worries that occupy her mind and keep her from sleep.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Pale of Vermont
But to become a writer I needed at least to learn about my own superstitions. I needed space in the house to sketch with words. I needed to commit heresies. And those acts had to feel pleasurable.
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Weekly Geekery
Understanding our origins. The New York Public library is encouraging people to make video games. Thoreau’s world of death. Can drugs help us understand life?
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When Does a Writer Grow Up?
The Atlantic examines adulthood and how we get there, including a close look at the life of a writer: Henry published his first book…when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and bouncing back and forth between…
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Three Hundred Pages of Henry David Thoreau’s Cabin Porn
Over at the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz takes aim at beloved transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau for being a humorless hypocrite, abstinence booster, and uninformed impugner of innocent jam-makers: The man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn…
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Remarks On Walking Around in Boston
As you walk, you become intensely aware in two directions. There is the outer world, and there is your head space. It is not necessary or possible really to keep strict focus on one or the other. They blend together.
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Rescuing Asian Art from American Artists
Generations of American writers have approached Asian cultures with the best of intentions but repeatedly missed the mark. How can we rescue Asian artists and thinkers like Hokusai from our own desire to experience them as foreign? How can we…