Craft and Creativity
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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…
What I’ve Learned from 19th Century Novels
Chances are, you were forced to read 19th century novels in high school—and, chances are, you might have hated reading them. Well, I did anyway. No one really explained to me the importance of reading Charles Dickens, so reading Charles Dickens was rather aggravating. My Junior year, I started to appreciate Victorian literature when I…