Author name: admin1

We were out at our house in Mount Carroll, Illinois for a quick turnaround weekend away. Mount Carroll is a small town just ten miles away from the Mississippi River, a quiet place where we try to step out of our Chicago city lives. Where we try to slow down. So there I was in my writing […]

I have been working on this essay for three days now. I have alternately been profound and poetic like Toni Morrison, curmudgeonly and erudite like Jonathan Franzen, and curmudgeonly and witty like David Sedaris. Oh, the beauty of my paragraphs! They make me dance! The points made are salient and insightful, the narrative flowing, my

In the Afterword of my forthcoming book, Jared Woodland writes: “This book is a development of obsessive abandon, one outcome of a transfixion from which the author might never recover.” Indeed the obsession that the project circled around is yet transposed over my gaze, a fixation that has changed the way I engage with the

I’ve never been a wake-up-at-five-in-the-morning-and-write-every-day kind of gal. I have nothing but admiration for people with that seat-of-the-pants-to-the-chair discipline, but that’s never been me. Instead I tend to wait — to cogitate and agitate — until I absolutely must put something on paper, until, whether because of an imposed deadline or internal pressure, it’s simply

This month there’s been a sudden surge of writing “Against Conceptualism.” Most notable is the piece of the same name written by Calvin Bedient, which recently appeared in the Boston Review, and was subtitled “Defending the Poetry of Affect.” As this subtitle suggests, the piece claims that while lyric poets continue to explore the nature

I’m sitting on a lawn chair on the front porch of a rented cabin near Livermore Falls, Maine, feet up and mug of coffee in hand. The sun is beaming through the trees, and loons are calling to one another across Parker Pond. The air is already moist and warm, and it’s not even nine

Two of my best friends from college visited me over a long, hot weekend in July. We spent a brief time in catch-up mode, covering the four years since our last meeting together, before slipping smoothly into the comfortable space of true and present friendship. When people are this intimate, bullshit becomes unnecessary. Truths and

My mother has come back from a trip to New Orleans and given me a piece of gris gris, a little piece of voodoo. It’s a little blue bag, big enough to hold a large olive, tied at the top with a black string. It smells faintly of men’s deodorant. I understand that it’s meant

When he was in high school, my older brother Don was a lifeguard at a lake. I was eight the summer our mother suggested he take me with him for a day and teach me to swim. He had rigged up plastic milk jugs that floated on the water with fishing line, sinkers and baited