Nick Ripatrazone
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Places Where Art is Made
We often look to metaphor for guidance in our constant search for the how and why of writing. In an essay at The Millions comparing writing to running, Nick Ripatrazone explains that training is not just an analogy for his creative…
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Teaching Pynchon
At its worst, Pynchon’s prose is a beautiful failure. At its best, Pynchon’s prose is revelatory. Nick Ripatrazone, writing for The Millions, talks about what makes it so hard to teach The Crying of Lot 49.
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Literary Duets
At The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone reviews BOMB Magazine’s “The Author Interviews,” “a collection of 35 interviews spanning 30 years.” He meditates on the competing definitions and modes, concluding he is “drawn” to interviews not “for their performative components” but for how…
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Rotating Writing 90 Degrees
At my desk next morning I held my pen and hunched my shoulders and leaned my head down, physically trying to look more deeply into the page of the notebook. I did this for only a moment before writing, as…
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, Aqueous Books released From Here, Jen Michalski’s second short story collection and fourth book. The founding editor of the literary quarterly jmww and a long-time Baltimore resident, Michalski’s fiction has found homes in more than 80 publications. Looking…
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The Devil Finds Work
Combining The Exorcist, New Jersey, and James Baldwin, among other things, Nick Ripatrazone reviews William Giraldi’s new novel, Hold the Dark, at The Millions. He contemplates Giraldi’s place in contemporary Catholic literature, using his fiction, alongside Cormac McCarthy’s and Christopher…
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Rising to Literature’s Bait
From Ernest Hemingway to Richard Brautigan and Jim Harrison, fishing and literature has always had a strong, mysterious link. Over at The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone goes deep into this ancient relationship.
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Creative Writing’s Business
Rumpus contributor Nick Ripatrazone writes about teaching students the business side of creative writing at The Millions, addressing some crucial questions: Should a writer submit to a literary magazine that only “pays” in contributor copies? What does it mean that…
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The Saddest Poem Ever Written
A lot of poems are sad, but over at The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone thinks he’s found the saddest: “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ripatrazone explores Hopkins’s poem, and while doing so, gives his thoughts on what good poetry…
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Flannery O’Connor Can’t Be Tamed
This quote from Paul Lisicky in an essay at The Millions neatly sums up why it can be so difficult to teach Flannery O’Connor’s work: …it’s so easy to simplify O’Connor. Even sophisticated readers are prone to missing out on…
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Searching for Rafters in the Dark
If sentimentality is a sin, it is only because feeling can be so beautiful. One moment of sentiment in literature is worth a thousand failures. We often cannot see the rafters in the dark, but what a shame it would…