So I crammed all those books into my head, and as I suspected, I can’t stop. I’m still cramming, still trying to slip just a few more books under my brain. It’s not that I need to. I want to. That’s what too much reading will do to you: it’ll make you want to read more. (Well, at least that’s how it goes with me.)

But because I’m getting close to exam time, I’m trying to concentrate more on the reading, with less time for writing about the books as I go. So, these will be brief: Full story »

After feeding twenty-six books into my head in thirty days, I’d like to say that I’m letting my brain decompress, but I’ll be honest: I’m still reading. In fact, I have two books going right now, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson. I want to hit up Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Wendell Barry’s agrarian essays, too, and I want to spend some time with David Cushman’s book on The Wilderness, Bloody Promenade. Maybe then I’ll be done. Maybe.

But there’s David Gessner’s Sick of Nature. There’s Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. There’s George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. And there’s still John Muir looming over everything, a backdrop to much of what I’ve read, as significant as the Sierra Nevadas, as significant as Thoreau and Walden.

So many books, so little time. Full story »

I first met Langston Hughes in 1990. He’d been dead some twenty-three years by then, and I was a few months shy of my twenty-first birthday. We met almost by accident.

It was January, and the country’s eyes were on football. The NFL had moved Super Bowl XXVII from Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California because Arizona had failed to make Martin Luther King, Jr. Day an official holiday. To protest Arizona’s decision, and to show support for the new holiday—and, perhaps even to show solidarity with the NFL—someone on my college campus in northwestern Pennsylvania decided to celebrate with a rally. I can’t remember how, but I wound up on the program.

I read Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”:  Full story »

I worry about hyperbole whenever I hear someone talk about a physical reaction to a piece of writing, so I’m hesitant to describe Rachel McKibbens’ book of poems, Pink Elephant, as a gut punch—but damn, it is. At one point, it also sent willies down my spine, too.

This is a collection of poems not to be trifled with.

“I am the star of the violence,” she warns in her first poem. In the second, “The First Time,” she and her brother are trying to run away. It might be any two kids running away from home, as almost all children are apt attempt at some point.

But subsequent poems make it clearer and clearer—and more horrifying—why they’re trying to escape. Jealousies, abuse, alcoholism, molestation, terror. “God was too busy for kids like us,” she realizes. Full story »

In an article in the September issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, poet Tony Hoagland traced the legacy of the New York School’s poetics. That legacy, he argues, has left contemporary poetry infused with “distractedness and haplessness,” which lowers the stakes and makes poetry “harmless in itself, quirky-cute, a sherbert-flavored course of hallucinogenic dessert art.”

There is, he suggested, “a kind of heroism and commitment missing from contemporary American poetry….”

Hoagland’s own poetry is filled with heroism of the everyday kind: slightly broken people trying to move through the world even as they’re besieged by consumerism, vapid media, and stuff. He’s wry and witty and keenly insightful, and everything always comes back to the struggle to understand what it means to be human.

Much contemporary poetry—at least of the post-New York School—forgets that struggle, though, and instead gets preoccupied by all that stuff. Full story »

Tony Medina sweeps into the Japanese steak house with the old Vapors song on his lips: “I think I’m turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so.” Even as he sings, he swoops around the end of our long table to hug his former mentor, the poet Maria Gillan, sitting at the far end. In the background, a fireball fwooshes up from one of the other grills across the room.

Our own chef has not yet started to cook. We’ve been waiting for Medina, the guest of honor, who’s back here in Binghamton, New York, for a brief writing residency at his alma mater. “He needed pants,” Gillan had told us a few minutes earlier, when Medina called to let us know he was running late. “He’s at Boscov’s, trying on pants.”

This is how Medina’s homecoming gets announced, with great good humor and the smell of sizzle in the air. Full story »

“The cyclops woman squints at them, those who deem themselves unlovely, and knows that no one would look at them twice in a crowd.” - “The Cyclops” by Teresa Milbrodt…

We live in an age of integration. We mainstream, accommodate, and in other ways try to make up for the cruelty of much of human history toward humans whose physical, mental, and emotional characteristics fall outside the range of that which we in our blissful ignorance have long called “normal.”

Teresa Milbrodt’s new book, Bearded Women, is the writer’s attempt to make “otherness” part of “normal” human experience. This group of stories takes human characteristics which we would normally associate with “freak shows” and weds them to narratives about “normal” human problems. It’s a brilliant conceit – and Milbrodt executes it so well that the reader finds him/herself following each story not with the voyeur’s eye to the main character’s “otherness” but with the sympathy/empathy that we would show to anyone we encountered who was struggling with problems that we’ve either faced and solved ourselves or helped friends or family members face and solve.

A few examples from the book will serve to make my point here clear:

* In “Bianca’s Body” the main character is a woman with two lower torsos – surely freak show stuff. Full story »

Painting on Papyrus

 The blue feathered ibis
	is a symbol of immortality;
the crescent-shaped lotus flowers,
	symbols of immortality;
even the goggle-eyed asp
	who sheds his skin,
		symbol
			of immortality.

Full story »

I’m ferociously cramming contemporary poetry into my head this semester in an attempt to force-feed my brain. Ostensibly, I’m a poet—but only because I’m taking a graduate-level poetry-writing workshop. I’m trying to figure this shit out, trying to figure out what I am and what I’m not by reading lots of stuff by poets who are.

I’ve taken recommendations from friends and classmates. I’ve browsed random collections at the bookstore. I’ve looked up names I’ve heard once upon a time and barely remembered. I’ve returned to old favorites.

Gary Jackson’s Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010) caught my eye because it was about comic books. Or so I thought. Full story »

by Lindsay Hayes

A recent study conducted at University of California, San Diego revealed that people enjoyed short stories more when they had been given a spoiler about the ending. That’s nice, but as far as I’m concerned spoilers are still the revelation of the damned.

While some have taken this study to mean spoilers aren’t so bad after all, I have a different take. Uses and Gratifications theory tells us that people use media for whatever purpose suits them at the time. Enjoyment is far from the only use of media consumption. It’s worth noting that the participants in this study were just that – participants in a study. They were not at the local Barnes & Noble seeking the gratification of a good read after a hectic work week. Full story »

My fascination with the Congo began, I think, with Warren Zevon’s “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.” Through sixty-six and seven, Roland fought the Congo wars with his finger on the trigger, knee deep in gore.

Or perhaps it was a Time-Life book I read at about that time, part of a series about unexplained phenomena like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, that featured tales of the mokele-mbembe, the dinosaur that lurked in the Congo’s dark swamps and jungles. The idea of such a thing captivated me; any landscape where such a beast could live had to be equally fantastic.

There’s been Conrad’s Heart of Darkness…Vachel Lindsay’s “Congo”…Henry Morton Stanley and “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” In 2000, there was Jeffrey Tayler’s beautifully descriptive Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Little surprise, then, when I saw Dancing in the Glory of Monsters and jumped on it. Full story »

Can aquaculture save the world’s last wild food? That’s the question posed by the cover story of the July 18 issue of Time, which takes a look at the continuing collapse of the world’s fisheries. Fish seems so superabundant on our dinner plates that one can hardly fathom how we could possibly run out. After all, the ocean is so BIG.

Well, the deep blue sea is getting emptier and emptier, and even if the shoreline seems far away, the fisheries crisis is going to start hitting close to home—soon.

That’s the outlook, grim as it is, forecast by author Paul Greenberg in his recent book, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. Greenberg dives into the topic with gusto—in part, one has to imagine, because the oceanic crisis is so catastrophic. Full story »

Wonderland
     - Club 1350, Long Beach, California

Tonight I want to go to hell, I want
to know there are Hearts more rock
than the granite in me. Down
Anaheim Street, the yellow dandelion street lights
spread more sparingly in the rear view,
the city reaches—like a garden
of hungry blossoms and weeds—to me. Full story »

If you’ve ever wondered what the twelve days of Christmas are—you’re in the middle of them. According to legend, the three wise men saw the Star of Bethlehem on Christmas and it took them twelve days of travel to get to the party. Their arrival, celebrated now on January 6, is known as the Feast of the Epiphany.

But what happened to them during their twelve-day trip?

According to novelist Paul Harrington, the “epic journey” was something like “Indiana Jones meets Lawrence of Arabia at a Lord of the Rings barbecue.” Full story »

“Why, for fifty-threes years I’ve put up with this now….”

So growls the Grinch as he laments the oncoming onslaught of Christmas joy certain to echo up from the little town of Whoville.

And for fifty-three years, we’ve put up with him.

It was fifty-three years ago this year, in 1957, that the Grinch made his first appearance. And it was forty-four years ago this week that he first appeared on television.

The idea for the Grinch came one December 26th when Theodore Geisel—better known as Dr. Seuss—looked in the mirror. “Something had gone wrong with Christmas,” Seuss later wrote, “or more likely with me. So I wrote the story about my sour friend, the Grinch, to see if I could rediscover something about Christmas that I’d obviously lost.”

The result, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, has become an enduring holiday favorite, and The Grinch has become as universally recognized as the crotchety, tight-fisted ol’ Ebenezer Scrooge when it comes to anti-holiday grouchiness. Full story »

photo by Talbot Eckweiler

“All writing is the same,” says playwright Christopher Shinn. “The hard part is doing it in the first place.”

Shinn, who won the Obie Award for playwriting in 2005 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2008, is Skyping with a group of creative writing students. He’s in New York City, where he teaches playwriting for the New School for Drama; they are in Allegany, New York, where they attend St. Bonaventure University.

“Writing is the hardest thing you will ever do,” Shinn tells them. “And once you understand just how hard it is, you realize it’s even harder than that. And it’s harder than that.” Full story »

A WordsDay Special

Let’s run the numbers.

At approximately 2:00 a.m., EST, I finished the first draft of my novel for National Novel Writing Month. My word count came in at 50,390; NaNoWriMo’s word count validator clocked me in at 50,101 words.

I actually passed the 50K-word mark at 1:43 a.m. A few days ago, I was unsure I’d make it to the finish line, but over the past three days, I hammered out 15,539 words. That’s 31% of my novel. (What the hell kind of art is that, part of me still wonders. I’ll get to that in a future post.)

I average about 500 words in 25 minutes. I could write faster if I pushed and didn’t try to work the language too much. I could write slower, too.

Aside from the 50K+ words I wrote for the novel, I wrote another 10,071 words (so far) about writing the novel as part of my S&R coverage of NaNoWriMo. On top of that, I wrote another 3,510 words about it for my own blog. Fold in the 2,654 other words I put together for S&R over the course of the month, and that totals 16,235 words on top of the 50,101 I clocked on the novel—a total of 66,336 words for November (and that’s not counting some significant writing projects for work that I had to crank out).

I’m stating the obvious here, but them’s a lot of words.

My head’s still swimming, but at least this damn novel isn’t crammed in there anymore. Maybe there’s a little room for sleep.

A WordsDay Special

If writing a 50,000-word novel in a month sounds like a crackpot idea, it is. So admits Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month and author of No Plot? No Problem! But Baty’s book also makes the idea sound like a total lark—and totally doable, too.

Baty and twenty of his friends, living in the shadow of Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com boom, launched NaNoWriMo as nothing more than something to do to kill time. “My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this,” he writes: “Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailers worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what’s possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in out mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.”

No Plot? No Problem! is not the book he set out to write that week. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

It’s crunch time.

I’m about 8K words off-pace on my novel, and I only have a few days to go.

I’d like to say this update on my National Novel Writing Month project, which was due on Thursday, was delayed because I was hammering away at my novel, but no—I was giving thanks, just like most other Americans.

While I stuffed my face with turkey and sweet potatoes and collard greens (yes!), my novel sat, alone and lonely, quietly whispering my name and saying, “We’re falling so far behind on NaNoWriMo, we’ll never catch up. I thought you had this?”

NaNoWriMo’s website suggests that I should be at 43,334 words. I’m at 35K. That means I’m staring down a double-barreled 8K deficit. That means I have 15K words to crank out in four days. That means I have to average 3,750 words a day in order to win.

I got this.

I think. Full story »

I won’t lie. It’s getting ugly.

I’m running about a day-and-a-half behind pace on my novel writing. According to National Novel Writing Month’s official website, the cumulative word count is supposed to be 30,000 as of today. I’m a little shy.

It’s not that the words aren’t there—they are. What’s missing are the hours in the day. There just aren’t enough of them. I physically don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do (join the club, eh?) let alone write everything I need to write.

And oh, yeah, there’s this rotten little voice in my head saying, “Fix that! Now!” Full story »