From the Archive: The Dark All Around Us
There is still light in the dark. This is the paradox that Little Bear has to accept in order to fall asleep.
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Join NOW!There is still light in the dark. This is the paradox that Little Bear has to accept in order to fall asleep.
...moreI hope, by writing this, language can jar a wound.
...moreEthel Rohan discusses her new story collection, IN THE EVENT OF CONTACT.
...moreIt’s exhausting, I realize, to constantly convince myself that I matter.
...moreSulaiman Addonia discusses his new novel, SILENCE IS MY MOTHER TONGUE.
...more“Healing is a process you must actively engage in.”
...moreEmily Arnason Casey discusses her debut essay collection, MADE HOLY.
...morePicture the French Surrealists recast as mobsters running a crime ring and you have the premise for Batterhill’s story.
...moreA poem doesn’t bring the dead back to life, but a memory has a touch of immortality: it’s a sort of recompense—forever isn’t exactly a lie, even if it’s not completely true.
...moreAt the New Yorker, an elegant and comprehensive essay by Julie Phillips from a visit with Ursula Le Guin at her home in Portland, Oregon touches on the importance of place, both geographic and imaginative. Phillips writes, “[Le Guin] has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or “McMagic” but the imagination […]
...moreWhen people call other people crazy I don’t get mad, I get bored. When people tell me ghosts don’t exist, I just get bored. Over at JSTOR Daily, poet Dorothea Lasky writes about The Imagination, “a physical space that one shares with other people in and through poetry,” the palpable materiality of alternative existences (like […]
...moreNot a day goes by that there isn’t some new study on how children’s brains work and what kind of media they should be consuming, With all the scientifically backed books out there now, it’s good to also have some children’s literature that’s still about introducing them to what stories can do. For Slate, Adrienne […]
...moreNabokov understood the seduction of maps as a way of ordering the fantastic, the disorderly, the sometimes contradictory nature of description, a visual aid to the internal eye. For Lit Hub, Susan Daitch gives a sweeping textual overview of the ways in which different authors have used maps to enrich their work, demonstrating how they […]
...moreOver at the Atlantic, Colleen Gillard takes a critical look at the differences between British and American children’s stories. While British stories for children tend to be rooted in fantasy and folklore, she writes, American children’s classics tend to be more grounded in realism. “Each style has its virtues, but the British approach undoubtedly yields the […]
...moreIf we only write what we know, when do we get to use our imaginations? The Millions explores the art of writing things we don’t know.
...moreFrozen is a study in what happens when imagination is constrained to a single narrative arc
...moreAuthor Neil Smith discusses his latest book, Boo, the suffering inherent in being thirteen years old, and how friendship can help pull us through traumatic events in our lives.
...moreWho are you?’ Isn’t this what every book asks of us as we chase its characters, trying to find out what they are reluctant to reveal? Is it not also the one essential thing we ask ourselves as human beings, as we struggle to make the choices that will define us? I can describe myself […]
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