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February 28, 2019Poetry School: Dana Gioia on the matter of poetry
Twenty-eight years ago US poet Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” was published in the Atlantic, sparking “a firestorm of debate and discussion” over the role of the poet in contemporary ...
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August 18, 2020(Cook)Book Therapy: County Heirlooms and Pandemic Cooking
“We hope you’ll try making some of these recipes, and we encourage you to find ways to make them your own. And we also hope this book inspires you, wherever you live, to find personal ways to connect ...
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October 31, 2020Book Therapy: Peter Counter’s Be Scared of Everything
“Life is all we have and, because we can’t contrast our experience with its absence, its value is unknowable. That’s what makes life a horror show.”—Peter Counter, Be Scared of Everything Lately ...
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May 12, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 5: The Speak o the Mearns
My parents are renters, so we moved houses a lot growing up. How can you expect continuity under those conditions, the steady passage of an uncomplicatedly teleological time? We can’t point to the place ...
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May 16, 2016Arguing Balls and Strikes
I always come back to baseball. As subject, I mean. Each time I think I'm done writing about it, or that I'd be better off focusing exclusively on the production of fiction, something occurs on a green ...
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May 11, 2016On Doubt
It'll be your constant companion. You won't know a day without it. It will defy cold logic and your efforts to cultivate confidence. It will be haughtily contemptuous of your desire to focus on positives, ...
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May 06, 2016Mother's Day
As people, as writers, we are often formed or directed by crystallizing moments in our lives, brief happenings which nonetheless persist in our minds, or which port some lesson, or confirm for us a suspicion ...
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May 26, 2016Rhubarb Crisp
By some trick of heredity, or upbringing, or brain chemistry, my greatest talent lies in finding the negative in what should be uniformly positive experiences. I'm generally on the hunt, when presented ...
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May 19, 2016Work
In January the flu raced through our house. It hitched a ride home from school on one child – one of the senior kindergarteners or the fourth grader, who can say which? – and in turn each of them ...
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July 05, 2018Scarborough: A Setting
When I was growing up in Scarborough, I loved it and hated it. I don’t think it’s an uncommon feeling towards places where we grew up. But there are things about coming of age in a suburb as a racialized ...
