Not Essay, Nor Fiction, But Prose: Of Narration
In his manifesto Reality Hunger, David Shields uses assemblage to curate a dialogue about the limits of The Real. The voices he appropriates and sequences implicitly argue that our increasingly urgent...
View ArticleMaybe Novels Are Actually Really Good for Television
Anne Carson writes that prose is a house and poetry is the man on fire running through it. I think we managed to convince ourselves that movies can be that house, when really it's more of an Airbnb....
View ArticleVicariousness and TV Recaps on the Internet
In his article "How Roland Barthes Gave Us the TV Recap," Sam Anderson writes that "a cultural critic is betwixt and between: not a regular consumer of culture and yet someone immersed deeply enough in...
View Article“Home Waters” by Elizabeth Poliner
It always seemed odd to me then that as we approached the one land I experienced in all of Connecticut as a land of Jewish multitude the first cue that we’d soon arrive would be the Holy Land U.S.A....
View ArticleStory of a Fire
When I finally dared to return to my building, I saw a trail of glass, which led me to the gaping space where my front door had been. With the entrance wide open to the outside, my apartment no longer...
View ArticleWhen Scripts Are Not Enough: Finding Your Voice Post-Election
Even if they don’t, even if our stories are met with apathy, with disdain, I believe our enduring anger and our passion require them. These stories sustain my activism because they make concrete the...
View ArticleFrom the Archive: “The Writer’s Ark,” by Nancy Willard
Any writer who takes Henry James's advice seriously, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost," will end up, sooner or later, looking for the hidden story—hidden because nobody was...
View Article“The Fall”: A Storytelling Masterpiece of Epic Proportions
The Fall offers storytelling lessons valuable to all writers and artists, which is one reason I’m repeatedly drawn to its magic and wonder.
View ArticleWriting My Way into Jewishness
The thing about identity is, people are always trying to define who you are for you, to tell you what you mean. And we should be interrogating our positions in society, our privilege relative to our...
View ArticlePas de Deux: Amy Fusselman’s “Idiophone”
"Idiophone is a dance between Fusselman and her reader; Fusselman is always fully leading, sometimes at a stately pace, but most often at one that is allegro, even allegro vivace."
View Article