Conversations: Paul Lisicky and Eileen Garvin
Eileen Garvin: The Narrow Door is a beautiful meditation on the writing life, on friendship, love and loss. Reviewers have described it as a love story, an elegy, an apologia…
Conjuring Green with Natalie Diaz
This is the drill when it comes to poetry workshops: print out enough copies of your poem, read it to a room full of strangers, and engage in a sort…
We should all be more like Steve Martin
I got the chance recently to see a performance of Steve Martin and Martin Short’s new comedy tour “An Evening You Will Forget For the Rest of Your Life.” And…
All that’s left: the art of Teresa Margolles
Photo: Teresa Margolles, Lemas (Mottos), 2009. Fabric impregnated with blood gathered from the places where murders took place embroidered with gold threads / Intallation view: What Else Could We Talk…
This wave in the mind: Woolf in the middle of my life’s journey
The following essay won second place in the 2017 Geneva Writers’ Group Literary Awards for Nonfiction, judged by Nick Barlay. The house was full of excitement bursting and receding like…
Conversations: Krysten Hill and Ruby Rose Fox
Sometimes, I stand awkwardly in kitchens at house parties, leaning over cheese spreads and imagining myself saying smarter things to strangers. It was at a house show like this that…
Ode to mentality; or, Poetry needs weird subjectivity
I’m working for free. I’m not a cynic. —Alan Dugan …one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. —Marianne Moore An Image for Readers “Does this poet…
We’re all so proud of you, signed David Sedaris
Earlier this summer, I brought my fresh copy of Theft by Finding to Common Good Bookstore in St. Paul to have it signed by David Sedaris. Having never met him…
Infertility Rites: Monica Youn’s Blackacre
In her previous life as an attorney, Monica Youn represented Mr. Potato Head and made the rounds explaining Citizens United to ordinary citizens. With her turn as mother, the former…