“Train time is found time”: Amtrak offers residencies for writers
This past week, the idea of writing residencies on Amtrak trains took off. On the 19th, Jessica Gross, Amtrak’s first writer-in-residence (for a few days, anyway), published a short essay… Read more »
Maxine Kumin, 1925-2014
On February 6, poet Maxine Kumin passed away in her home in Warner, New Hampshire, the Boston Globe reports. She was 88. Kumin’s poetry career began over sixty years ago, as she explained… Read more »
Pew collects data on American libraries
In late January, the Pew Research Center aggregated a list of “10 facts about Americans and public libraries,” a collection of data from surveys administered over the past year. The… Read more »
Literature and medicine
In a recent segment on PBS NewsHour, host Jeffrey Brown and poet laureate Natasha Trethewey examined the intersection between poetry and medical healing. The feature, called “Student physicians examine poetry to hone art… Read more »
Writing drunk: Olivia Laing finds links between writing and drinking
We’ve all heard Hemingway’s “Write drunk; edit sober,” and Baudelaire’s “One should always be drunk.” We’ve imagined our favorite writers at typewriters with highballs or with rings of wine on… Read more »
Each poem an elegy
On the cusp of the new year, Octopus no. 16 went live, and with it Heather Christle’s “Poem for Bill Cassidy.” Cassidy, as Christle explained in a blog post, was published… Read more »
The internet in print
The going hasn’t been so easy for print media lately. New York magazine recently announced that it would be cutting back to biweekly issues in March, causing editor-in-chief Adam Moss to… Read more »
On accessibility in poetry
In a recent piece for the New York Times, David Orr investigates “Points of Entry” in poetry. In contrast to the usual argument on accessibility, Orr builds his by beginning with the… Read more »
Women writers on sexism in the industry
On Friday, Brooklyn Based published a wide-ranging set of responses from five female authors on sexism in publishing, primarily fiction. Orli Van Mourik begins her piece by briefly covering the… Read more »
The Library of Lost Books
Apparently there’s a better way to handle books you no longer need than destroying 250,000 of them, as my home county’s library system did this year. The Birmingham Public Library,… Read more »