Craft and Creativity
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Satire in the Age of Hype
By the time I purchased the bestselling novel Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke, I had already encountered the book and other readers’ thoughts on it several times—actually, a lot more than several. I had seen the cover, heard the premise, observed reader reactions, and absorbed enough of the online conversation that the novel arrived to…
The Poetry of Attention
If you happened to get July’s Fiction Newsletter, you might have read that I’m having a summer of the 19th century novel. Weirdly enough, I like 19th century novels better than I like 19th century poems. I like 19th century poems, too, but I feel like the 20th century did for poetry what the 19th…
On Writing What’s Already Been Written
I often encounter a concern among writers that they have nothing new to contribute to literature. Why write if what I have to say has already been written? The written word is, what, 4,000 years old? We know from our translations of cuneiform tablets that people have been grappling with the same problems of society we…