Craft and Creativity
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Newest Features
What Can Poetry Teach Us About Living Well?
I’ve been thinking a lot about what “a life worth living” means. Not in the suicidal sense—which I feel is worth clarifying, given the fact that I write poetry—but in the philosophical sense of The Good Life. There’s a large body of philosophy that addresses the question of The Good Life. Socrates believed a good…
New Journalism, True Crime, and How Stories Impact Us
In November 1959, in a rural town towards the Southwest corner of Kansas, two ex-convicts murdered the Clutters—a well-respected farming family—in their own home. The story made national headlines, but we remember it not for the front page of any newspaper, but because of Truman Capote’s 1966 “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. The book is almost…
A Stone’s Throw: Revisiting “The Lottery” Thirty Years Later
I first read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in my eighth-grade English class, in the spring of 1993. I remember the setting with almost eerie clarity: the rattling of the old air conditioner, the smell of chalk dust mixed with post-gym class body odor, my teacher Mrs. Conti’s unfortunate mushroom-shaped haircut, and the way my purple…