Craft and Creativity
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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…
New Journalism, True Crime, and How Stories Impact Us
In November 1959, in a rural town towards the Southwest corner of Kansas, two ex-convicts murdered the Clutters—a well-respected farming family—in their own home. The story made national headlines, but we remember it not for the front page of any newspaper, but because of Truman Capote’s 1966 “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. The book is almost…