Explore

Poet’s Work

Grandfather advised me: learn a trade. I learned to sit at a desk.

Portraits of American Poets

Poser

Art is a way for the mind to master the body, even if it is not one’s own.

Publishing in the Digital Age

There’s this cool magazine online. They let people read it for free.

Reading

The Interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never...

Reading Auden (Christmas Morning, 2021)

You sounded so confident about the Old Masters and I loved you for that.

Reading Henry James in the Suburbs

She had boyfriends before she met him. Well, not really boyfriends.

Reading His Poetry

A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey. It’s a little like cheating.

Reading His Poetry

Our crowns are made of dead hair and get swept out with the trash.

Reading His Poetry

A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey. It’s a little like cheating.

Reading His Poetry

All down my street the new fathers beat the kingness out of the kings.

Reading His Poetry

She holds her smile like a note sustained at the end of a phrase.

Reading His Poetry

Words appear like the answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked.

Reading Hrabal

The Warsaw Pact invaded in 1968 and soon banned Hrabal’s work.

Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home

Remembering Robert Stone

The legendary author Robert Stone, in the words of his friends.

Revision

She’d lifted the plot from a TV show she’d watched the night before.

Revisiting

I was bold, even reckless, in what I wrote, and in how I wrote it.

Reynolds Price

Russell Chatham the Painter, Recently Hospitalized, Emerges from Seven-Figure Debt and Alcoholism, Ready to Paint

An eye trained only for darkness makes for a lesser path, in art as in life.

School’s Out

Kids were just let out of school to spend the summer running in packs.

Selections from Angle of Yaw

Last year alone, every American choked to death on a red balloon.

Seven Deadly Sins

Carol Edgarian

Shirley Hazzard

We have mysterious inclinations. No one can explain it to us.

Site Visits

The grass is always greener in the cemetery, was a joke I made to Jed.

Solo Notes

This has been a good day. First the milestone of getting to page 300.

Stoner

“It means,” Stoner said again, and could not finish what he had begun.

Storyteller and Showrunner Clyde Phillips

I think of each story as a big circle that’s all around me and I’m in the center.

That Ain’t Jazz

They drink hard liquor and growl about which musicians are hot.

That Final Paper You Want from Me

The consensus was that all the great writers drank way too much.