I used to require my college writing students to attend: MFA in Writing Residency Brings Top Writers to Seaside for Nightly Readings in January The Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Writing program hosts readings by top contemporary writers during its 10-day residency in Seaside. The series offers a rare opportunity to hear these [...]
The Conditional Ada Limón - 1976- Say tomorrow doesn't come. Say the moon becomes an icy pit. Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified. Say the sun's a foul black tire fire. Say the owl's eyes are pinpricks. Say the raccoon's a hot tar stain. Say the shirt's plastic ditch-litter. Say the kitchen's a cow's corpse. [...]
Some of this story is fiction, but it doesn't matter which parts because that's not the point. When you are seventeen, riding a borrowed bicycle, you are stuck by a car and suffer what they used to call a compound fracture. You could search online for what they call that kind of break today. But [...]
Let America Be America Again Langston Hughes (1902-1967) Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be [...]
Some books were entertaining but slid right off the dinner plate of my attention and a few I did not like. Here are two novels—though not the only two—I thought were wonderful. Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout I loved Olive Kitteridge, but I loved this one more. Maybe that is because I am aging and Strout [...]
[There's a great link at the bottom—don't miss it.] “Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”—Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose vs. For some, reading functions "as class performance, literature [...]
I just finished In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. I usually read a book in a few days, but this memoir took longer. Where was the wisdom I was seeking? I was afraid for a long time that it would not come. I was doing NaNo during those weeks too, so I was writing [...]
