April 22, 2016
Fenton on Shakespeare’s King Lear
Read Fenton’s riff on the National Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, published in Silas House and Jason Howard’s online journal Still: stilljournal.net/still-life.php...
What I’m Reading and Why
March 26, 2014
On the Literature of Social Justice
Here's a link to my quick look at the roots of the literature of social justice, published in the excellent online magazine Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments: http://terrain.org/2014/reviews-reads/recommended-reads-literature-social-justice/ In autumn 2014 I'll be teaching a graduate craft of literature course through the University...
March 8, 2012
Research and the Memoir
Remarks delivered at the Associated Writing Programs 2012 Conference, Chicago, Illinois, 3 March. Read remarks in PDF format. Life is research; thus, the memoir. Research deepens and enriches memory. I search for prompts, which in turn direct the research, which in its turn sparks memory. I take issue...
August 12, 2010
Madame Bovary: Desire, Grace, God
Even in loquacious, verbose English -- elegantly performed in my audio version by Simon Vance, in a translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling -- the precision of Gustave Flaubert’s French comes through. We are all searchers and Emma Bovary is the distillation of our longing. She marries...