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June 30, 2015
Lollipops (Take 2)
Keep going, the poster read. Your legs will forgive you…eventually.On Sunday, I ran my first half-marathon. It might not seem like a big deal, but there were hills and it was hot. So hot in fact that ...
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June 25, 2015The Lucky Seven Interview, with Ken Murray
William Oaks has managed to create the facade of a normal, even dull, man. But when his parents die in a car accident, that facade is shattered, and William's complicated family history, filled with religious ...
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June 24, 2015
Why I Read Obituaries
To get out of a dry writing spell several years ago, I had to take drastic measures. To take drastic measures meant calling my writer friend. In Ontario.She was shocked but not surprised when I called ...
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June 20, 2015
Bravery Through Bestsellers
In a recent cultural comment in The New Yorker, South African-born social anthropologist and writer Ceridwen Dovey investigates whether reading can make us happier. She describes a session with a bibliotherapist ...
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June 18, 2015On Buttery Butter, Compress to Impress, Less Is More, Etc.
To indicate her displeasure with overwritten sentences, my grandmother used the phrase "buttery butter." What she meant by it was this: if you write "butter" it’s clear already what you’re talking ...
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June 13, 2015
Twere Easier for God to Make Entirely New Men…
Exactly 199 years ago today, during a stormy night at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley had a waking dream that gave birth to Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus. How do we know? Astronomers. ...
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June 11, 2015
Why I Am in Love with Margaret Atwood
I wanted to do something different, so midway through last term, I wrote a proposal for Mutants and Monsters, a new science fiction course.Since I teach biochemistry for a living and have been reading ...
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June 09, 2015
On the Benefits of Not Writing (Surfing)
It isn’t (usually) wise to blame other people for things that happen to you, but I blame Dr. Kary Banks Mullis for everything.Dr. Mullis is a Novel Prize-winning biochemist who devised paradigm-shifting ...
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June 07, 2015
Chopsticks
Last summer, I made chilled noodle soup.Why? I was writing a short story that took place in North Korea, and I was stuck. The plot, for some reason, had twisted into a Gordian knot (if you know what I’m ...
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June 06, 2015Could We Can the Cover Copy?
I’m going to tell you something about my fiction-reading habits: I always skip the cover copy. The publisher-penned description printed on the cover and used everywhere from retailers’ websites to ...
