Before we are aware of it, we all of us find we are talking about Shakespeare. —Lytton Strachey, “Words and Poetry” Yet Shakespeare is a very queer case. —Virginia Woolf, “Personalities” 1. Reading Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare in Bloomsbury and Will Tosh’s Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, I […]
Though best known as a novelist, Virginia Woolf wrote more words of nonfiction than fiction. Her nonfiction oeuvre spans six dense volumes of collected essays, six volumes of collected letters, five volumes of collected diaries, plus the book-length essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas and the biography Roger Fry. […]
In 2016, when my first book came out, I wrote an essay for the Story Prize blog titled “Why I Am Not a Poet”. It concluded: “Go out of bounds. If your true interests are those of poetry, it doesn’t matter if you’re not a poet.” That essay is something […]
A question I have come back to when providing feedback on a couple of very different manuscripts for friends recently: What is it important for the reader to know? With one of those manuscripts in particular, it was really a question of how much the writer wanted to leave the […]
“The good thing about the novel is that it can really be anything.”—Robert Glück, Paris Review interview (Art of Fiction no. 260), Fall 2023 Novels are vexing. Reading them, writing them, thinking about them. Vexing! I write this having read another novel that had lots of elements I enjoyed and […]
I’ve just finished attending the 2019 International Virginia Woolf Conference, a marvelous event focused this year on questions of Woolf and social justice. Most (but not all) of the attendees were affiliated in some way with academia, and one of the questions that recurred through the conference was: How do […]
This past week, I attended the third Northeast OER (Open Educational Resources) Summit at UMass Amherst. (For a general report on that, see Matt Reed’s write-up for Inside Higher Ed, or, for a whole variety of views, check out the Twitter hashtag #NEOERSummit2019.) I presented a 25-minute talk titled “Gift […]