Craft and Creativity
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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…
Poem As Mosaic
This craft essay was first featured in the Writers.com Poets newsletter. Subscribe below! Poem: “Everything All at Once” By Oliver Baez Bendorf Retrieved here. right now, someone is having sex and someone is dying and someone is trying to find a lid so they can, before bed, put away the soup and someone is dreaming…
Literature, Nostalgia, and Making Sense of Our Lives
One of my favorite reads last year was My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff, a memoir which, apparently, also had a movie adaptation. Rakoff explores her first year out of grad school, in the mid-1990s, in which she worked as an assistant in a literary agency—the one that represented J. D. Salinger. And the memoir…