Craft and Creativity
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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…
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…