Gemstone
As an ice storm encases an upstate New York town in rime, a young girl struggles with the impulse to rewrite her past. My short story "Gemstone" appears in the new issue of Flyway: Journal of Writing and the Environment.
Read MoreNowhere Ho!
Nothing says the Holocaust like Anne Frank's diary. On July 18, 1945, after his return to Amsterdam from Auschwitz, Otto Frank received an answer to his newspaper advertisement from two sisters who had seen his daughters die in Bergen-Belsen...
Read MoreThe Literati, Child’s Play, and Happy Hour
Do you like books? Do you like fast-paced intellectual discussions? Do you like drinking in bars and—this is an important one—do you like Chicago in the winter? If you do, you're invited to join me next year at AWP 2012.
Read MoreThe Winner Returns
Today it’s common for authors to play with reality, memory, and fiction in their writing, but it wasn’t always that way. In the genre of memoir, which evolved from autobiography, writers found refuge from nonfiction’s more inflexible building blocks—facts, for example.
Read MoreNabokov the Psychologist
A well-written essay by Brian Boyd in The American Scholar. What is the relationship between imagination, memory, and creativity? These relationships—and the relationship of psychology to fiction—is one that I’ve been thinking about lately as I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation).
Read MoreLet There Be Light
Over 185 years since Nicéphore Niépce took the world’s first photograph—a photogravure of Pope Pius VII in 1822—the process of photography continues to develop in unanticipated ways. From heliography and silver chloride to Adobe Lightroom and digital single-lens reflex cameras, pioneers would scarcely recognize the 19th-century industry they helped to define.
Read More
Recent Comments