Scarlet

I had fantasies about how hugely creative I would be while pregnant — my body’s creation of a new person would ignite unprecedented levels of inspired creativity for my brain. I never expected how appallingly far off that was. My brain had never before experienced such vacuous emptiness as it did during those early weeks […]

The year my dad died, I was taking writing classes at University of Chicago. I was twenty-two and I wanted to be a writer. But let me clarify. I didn’t want to write. Writing was fucking hard. Writing meant sitting alone in my apartment, something I already did more than I wanted to. But being

Writing on a keyboard has become a natural gesture of many modern humans. Not a gesture but a motion; not a motion but a manner of being; more like eating or making love, a mode with us; as an apprentice woodworker would, years ago, have carved a dove from a pine knot in the off

I wrote in a poem once that I am “ruled by ruled paper.” I buy ten-cent notebooks at back-to-school specials and proceed to make lists and notes in them throughout the year. Things like stop by the bank, make brownies, email Sean, scoop cat’s litter box, update google calendar, GRADE, work on chapbook, Casandra’s open

I wrote in a poem once that I am “ruled by ruled paper.” I buy ten-cent notebooks at back-to-school specials and proceed to make lists and notes in them throughout the year. Things like stop by the bank, make brownies, email Sean, scoop cat’s litter box, update google calendar, GRADE, work on chapbook, Casandra’s open

To say it now: I can hear the tangible skin of words — as one might with his tongue taste musicalities or catch with the olfactory glands the boulder-grey whiffs of uncertainty. In eleventh grade, one afternoon, in my high school library, contemplating how O’Hara was telling us that Lana Turner had fallen, I came

How do we as writers best learn successful habits? By emulating the successful? As I prepared for my first return to AWP in six years, I had to brace myself for the inevitable recognition of Survivorship Bias in my own thinking and the confounding nature of writing advice in general. Never mind the fact that

You imagined the chair of the creative writing program spoke the same words as the head of the drama department. “She is terrible, but there is something about her.” You imagined the chair twisted his mustache hair while he looked at some other core faculty on the opposite side of his desk. Then you saw

Comedian Steve Harvey has a routine where he talks about the third eye of comedians. In talking about this third eye, he says that you get your two natural eyes, but you also get a third eye that allows you to “see” the underlying currents in situations — or, to see things that others don’t

My friend Chris invited me to visit her at work. She’s a nurse practitioner at a VA clinic in San Francisco, and she and her colleague Erin had begun a writing group for homeless vets. I’d helped them set up the guidelines for the group, using what I’d picked up from my time as a