CraftTag

Vulnerability is a Writing Tool

My most reflexive apology is, “I went to theatre school.” Usually delivered with a shrug or a knowing smirk as if to say I can’t help it, it gets a laugh from the creative set about 82 percent of ...

Dessert

Outside my window are two strands of spidersilk, about five inches apart, both slanting downwards from left to right at a sharp angle. They move semi-independently in the slight morning breeze, almost ...

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 ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 4: I Scream of Benigni

I feel a mounting sense of anxiety that I still haven’t said everything I said I would. I have called my shot and then proceeded to chuck basketballs, tennis balls, darts, arrows, and various other ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 3: "To See Someone Who Does Not See"

So now I have to do what I said I would do and start offering some ways of escaping the individualist narrative conventions of the bourgeois novel. They will by no means be the only ways. Not by a longshot. ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 2: Is the Bicycle Dead?

Before I do anything else, I have to try to say what I mean by fictional forms. I do so with a lot of trepidation, because my sense of these things is idiosyncratic and perhaps wrong. But here goes.People ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 1

It’s Monday, May 1st. If you’re reading this in Canada or the United States, you are most likely working today. I know I am. At this very moment I am probably guiding a group of adult learners through ...