writing

Photo via: Yitz Woolf — Ruth and Ibtisam hugging. Picture this. A Jewish mom in Jerusalem gets breast cancer and joins an Israeli-Palestinian breast cancer support group. She meets a Muslim…

Square Wave by Mark de Silva Two Dollar Radio, 2016 376 pages – TDR / Amazon   I teach composition to college freshmen who uniformly hate it. Sometimes it’s fun, but…

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the home, then, of Eckrich Meats.  Martone ate sandwiches constructed with Eckrich cold cuts: Bologna, Old Fashioned Loaf, Olive Loaf, Honey Loaf,…

On Writing by Charles Bukowski (edited by Abel Debritto) Ecco, 2015 224 pages – Ecco / Amazon   On Writing by Charles Bukowski, edited by Abel Debritto, is a book Bukowski…

Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors Amazon Publishing, 2015 270 pages – Amazon   Process—as in “Could you tell us a bit about your writing process, please?”—is one of…

Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher by Garret Keizer Metropolitan Books (Macmillan), 2014 320 pages – Macmillan / Amazon   In 2011, Garret Keizer published an article in Harper’s…

We were convinced that some of the best writing from writers we knew happened outside of their normal writing forms and practices, e.g., in conversation, in emails, in rants while driving, etc. We then began commissioning these works as they occurred or as we encountered them, and we published them as our Tract Series of pamphlets.

Shit. I don’t want to be the one to bring this up, but I have to. We all cheat in some way—whether it’s finding inspiration from the indexes of poetry…

Two-headed feelings each have their own brains, which is the characteristic that differentiates them from two-faced feelings. The condition of two-headedness in feelings is most often caused by a developmental…

Last week will go down as the week I started sending myself text messages. Not notes in an emergency, just language at risk of becoming unmoored because its urgency could…

Welcome to a world that’s a bit bleaker even than our own, where desolation is the daily bread and death more common than kindness. By my rough guesstimate, in total…

Gilles Deleuze was wrong when he claimed that we no longer live in the society of the spectacle. When he claimed, before leaping to his death in Paris, that we…

Writer’s block is a strange concept. Perhaps it doesn’t exist. If it exists, it exists differently for me than it does for you. It’s a concrete block, perhaps, or a…

“You are the problem.” I like to think of myself as that clichéd, “work in progress.” Maybe because, within my self-imposed constitution, the bettering of oneself is ultimately what keeps…