The Rumpus Interview with Stacy Szymaszek
Poet Stacy Szymaszek discusses her most recent collection, Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals, the “notebook genre,” and claiming a city—ugly sites and all.
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Posts Tagged: notebooks
Taking on Your Shelf of Blank Notebooks
At Catapult, Rachel Vorona Cote takes readers down a path of struggle that far too many writers walk, but aren’t always able to talk about or understand. In “Black Books and Letting the Ink Dry,” Vorona Cote looks at the “paradox of the blank book”: The paradox of the blank book is this: It invites our most intimate scribbles […]
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Torres’s Family Portrait
I’m constantly making up stories, and writing histories, even when I’m not putting them into songs.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Defeat
It never occurred to me to try to write poems without the guidance of other poets and poems.
...moreAfrofuturist Worries
Underwriting the words on that page are the counterposing sentiments I see in many writers I know, especially writers of color: At one pole there’s, I just want to be okay; I want my family/community to be okay. At the other pole there’s, If I only reach the mountaintop I’ll be respected, valid, wealthy, etc. […]
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Greg Saunier’s Tour Survival Kit
In the first installment of Wanted/Needed/Loved, Greg Saunier of Deerhoof talks about the items he can’t live (or tour) without.
...moreOur Own Private Lives
Daniel Alarcón interviews Alejandro Zambra for BOMB Magazine; among other things, they touch on William Carlos Williams, Chile, bonsai trees, dictators, and beautiful notebooks.
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Where I Write #29: Ten Werecantos
We think of our brains as a place. We surround thoughts with metaphors of environment.
...moreGo Tell It on the iPhone
Praise the writer’s notebook, and praise the evolution of the writer’s notebook. Over at the New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about archiving the daily details digitally in photographs, rather than on paper: Photography engenders a new kind of ekphrasis, especially when the writer herself is the photographer. That is why I have found myself so willing to […]
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Attention, Attention
Within the crowd is a bald-headed, bearded man. He carries a sketchpad that, if he were sitting cross-legged, would be big enough to cover his knees. He is not a reporter. “The funeral is over, but the corpse is still grooving,” he writes. The man is Shel Silverstein.
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