Amassing research and playing with it and seeing what it might turn into is very much a practice I enjoy. I would do that even if I didn't write essays. The last year of not writing any essays is a testament to that.
Read MoreConstellation of Memory: An Interview with C.G. Hanzlicek by Christopher Buckley
No emotion recollected in tranquility; it was all heat of the moment.
Read MoreRoundtable Discussion: “Lessening our Existential Despair,” a Conversation with Fiction Writers, Emily Wortman-Wunder and Jennifer Wortman by Emily Sinclair
I read these stories as, in part, witnessing our current political, environmental, and cultural exigencies and the way they push on our interior lives and our relationships. Of course, it’s easy to read everything that way these days, given the lightspeed of our news cycles and the dire tones of our news.
Read MoreA Normal Interview with Maceo Montoya
I saw an opportunity to approach this very serious history from a different angle.
Read MoreA Normal Interview: Conversation on The Spirit of Disruption
Featuring 28 writers, The Spirit of Disruption: Landmark Essays from the Normal School is an anthology containing an eclectic array of traditional and innovative creative nonfiction essays that were published in the Normal School during the ten years since its launching in 2007-2008. Over email, editor Steven Church spoke with me about it in-depth.
Read MoreWord Music: A Discussion with Brian Turner and Benjamin Boone By Optimism One
Given the common ground between the two art forms, it is no surprise, then, that creatives throughout history have combined music with poetry, poetry with music. And that pursuit continues today, whether it is at your local open mic, the Lincoln Center in New York City, or on record. Two recent examples of the latter can be found on The Interplanetary Acoustic Team’s 11 11 (Me, Smiling), conceived of and directed by poet Brian Turner, who uses the written and spoken artifacts of the poet Ilyse Kusnetz, also his late wife; and on The Poetry of Jazz, a collaboration between saxophonist Benjamin Boone and the late poet Philip Levine.
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