I’ve been working on a secret project: a new book. From 2018 to 2024, I wrote a blog called Finite Eyes (the title comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson), where I explored ideas about education, teaching, learning, academic publishing, and open access resources. It was closely tied to my work […]
Francesca Wade’s new book, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, has been cause for some good writing about Stein recently. I have most appreciated Adam Thirlwell’s LRB essay “Devotion to the Cut” (more about Stein than about Wade’s book) and Ryan Ruby’s Bookforum review “In Search of Lost Stein”. Reading these pieces made me […]
1. In November 2016, I was in graduate school and formulating plans for a doctoral dissertation on 20th century literature. I knew the writers I wanted to focus on (Virginia Woolf, Samuel Delany, J.M. Coetzee) and the general approach (modernism and metamodernism), but I didn’t have an angle on that […]
I continue, having really hardly stopped for decades now, to read Virginia Woolf’s two Common Reader collections. In the absence of an adequate Selected Essays (the Oxford World’s Classics one is thin and lacking even “The Death of the Moth”), the Common Readers must suffice. (For more of my thoughts […]
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 […]
My dear friend Chris Barzak and I were lucky enough to have our first novellas published within about a month of each other: his A Voice Calling (Psychopomp) and my Changes in the Land (Lethe Press). We thought it would be fun to talk about the novella form and our own particular […]
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 […]
Last week, I attended the annual Modern Language Association Convention, this year in Philadelphia. While in general I am still skeptical of the amount of resources that academic conventions require (money, time, stress), I enjoy MLA — it’s an opportunity to hear about things I don’t get much opportunity to […]
For at least a year now, I’ve been making random notes toward what may, in coming decades, if I live long enough, become a book about fiction and magic (and by magic, I mean both prestidigitation and occult ideas). Since I would like these Lexias to be opportunities for trying […]
In an interview with Steven Millhauser at the LA Review of Books, Kevin Koczwara asks, “Is there something that you love about the short story form? Today, it seems, short stories are out of style for one reason or another. Maybe they never were in vogue—I am thinking of how John […]
Dad is an inventor. In 1912 his submarine had the world’s record for staying under water. Running as it did by means of a gasoline engine, it left bubbles on the surface, so it was not employed during World War 1. Dad says he does his best work when he […]
1. Take a moment, settle yourself, and note your immediate emotional response to these words: kindnessjoycontemplationgenerositylovepeace Now think about them in the context of your work. Would your work be better if there were more of these things? Do you feel that they are relevant to what you do every […]