Craft and Creativity
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What Makes Revision So Hard?
There is no shortage of craft books, poetry guides, artist’s manuals, and Substack thinkpieces articulating the power of poetic revision. Everyone, myself included, thinks they have something wise to impart about the process of shaping sand into sandcastles, clay into sculptures, or whatever analogy you want to represent the act of revision. Still, none of…
Excavating Memories in Creative Nonfiction
When I was a very little kid, my parents took me to see the Rolling Stones in concert in Hartford, Connecticut. It was the Steel Wheels tour, I got a t-shirt (that I am devastated to have since lost), and it marked a certain coolness on behalf of both my family and Mick Jagger. As…
Reading Without Needing Resolution
I picked up Audition by Katie Kitamura after it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, partly out of curiosity and partly because of the way people kept describing it. Odd. Unsettling. Unresolved. I had heard those words often enough to know they weren’t meant as praise in the conventional sense—and I was aware, too, that…