“I Am Not Your Muse” and Other Lies Our Teacher Told Me
Colleen McClary’s crimson lips upturned at the corners. “I am not your muse and every good story is based around a problem.” I thought she looked like a beautiful witch….
The Light of Possibilities: On Patrick Park’s Tucumcari
From the opening sentence of Patrick Parks’ remarkable debut novel Tucumcari, readers are invited into the bewildered reality of a man whose life exists in an interwoven fabric of the…
It Puzzles the Will: Hamlet and Suicide
Madeline Levine, the celebrated author of Teach Your Children Well, recently gave a talk to the faculty of three loosely aligned independent schools, including my own. She said a lot…
Weather Democracy
Twenty-first century Americans face two seemingly separate and intractable crises, either one of which could bring the modern way of life, and perhaps many lives as well, to an end….
The Wind on Mors Island
Last year, at age 90, Knud Sørensen put out his fourteenth poetry collection to go along with his 35 other works of biography, novels, short stories, essays, and memoir. After…
Szymborska as Prophet
There is a stark difference between the universal and the cultural, the true and the rational, and voice and language. In The End and the Beginning, as in her other…
The Novel is dead, long live the novel
Novelists announce the death of the novel with such sinister regularity you’d be forgiven for thinking they can’t wait to find themselves out of a job. It’s a cyclical theme,…
Stealing Liam Rector
When I was a boy a boy when I was boy I thought the language was a language Would send me everywhere there was to go. I thought there was…
The Date (redux)
In her essay “The Date,” Brenda Miller talks about the photos we hang on our refrigerators, photos of ourselves with those we love. We originally hang them to remind ourselves…