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Writing East
Maybe I’m homesick or maybe I’ve just sold out, but I’ve stopped distinguishing between the states that make up the great green Midwest I call home.
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Poetry, or How to Pray Without a God
April is national poetry month, but a lot of people don’t know or care about it. Completely understandable. Many teachers introduce us to poetry as if it were a fine science.
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The Library Full of Bowling Balls
The short story form is a special kind of animal. It is the form that students of fiction are made to learn first, as though crafting a finely-spun tale of less than twenty or so pages is the first step toward tackling the beast that is the novel. But this is mostly nonsense.
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Divorces & Celebrations
Cam Asutra & Sue Trakama Cam Asutra knew from the moment he saw Sue Trakama walking down the aisle in December of 2009 that their marriage was going to end in divorce. Ms. Trakama was wearing a wedding dress that she describes as “sexy” and Mr. Asutra describes as “upsetting,” though both agree that it…
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Libraries
In my house there is a library. It used to be called the playroom, back when I was very small and very young and learned what _Don Quixote_ was by watching the _Wishbone_ episode. It was a library then, too, but I didn’t really notice. It has shelves for walls all stuffed with books, generally…
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A Snap
A snap. Audible, no, probably not. But tenable, real. Crack. The sound that comes when you break. I know. I broke two days ago. It was afternoon, or evening, I’m not certain. Snapped from everything. I was a leaf, all else a branch—a tornado snapped our connecting twig, and I was swept up. I don’t…
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One Sentence of the Aeneid
The concept for this article – reviewing a book based on one random sentence – is borrowed from an article printed in the literary magazine The Believer. Virgil’s Aeneid “A chill swept over Aeneas; his limbs went weak; he moaned in terror and stretched his hands toward heaven” (I.91-2) Hundreds of years before The Catcher…
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David Mamet Talking To His Son
DM: Son, I’d like you to come over here. JOE: Come over there? DM: Yes, come over here. JOE: But yesterday you said– DM: Why don’t you come– JOE: Yesterday at Disneyland– DM: –come and sit over here. JOE: [looking at DM] Alright. [JOE approaches DM. JOE looks into his eyes. DM looks to his…
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There’s Good News and Bad News
Dad, that email you sent with your top 25 YouTube vid’s from the summer of ’08 was great.