This week in my Tutorial Advising class we had the pleasure of hosting Ada Calhoun, author of St. Marks is Dead, which argues, of course, the exact opposite. Ada offered keen insight into the life of the working writer and editor (she’s both), and provided evidence once again of the significance of community in developing a singular voice. We read […]

The writer Kathryn Joyce has written a remarkable essay for Pacific Standard that I hope some of my students will read. Part of the larger conversation about PTSD I’ve been having all year in light of Jennifer Percy’s Demon Camp, this essay, set in upstate New York, is moving and useful and spectacularly written. Here’s a snippet. The […]

My food writing class this week is reading J.M Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, largely for its focus on the relationship between imagination and ethics. The only fiction we read in the class, the novel has captured for me some very basic ideas about the power of sympathy, what Coetzee calls the the faculty “that allows us to share the being of another.” […]

This week, the writer Jennifer Percy visited my Tutorial Advising class to discuss several of her own reported pieces, including one for the New York Times Magazine that sent her into Syria to get the story of American vigilantes trying to fight ISIS, and also to reflect a little on the writing of Leslie Jamison. Percy raised […]

This Thursday, March 10, I’m helping to host an event that features one of the writers we read last semester in my religion writing course, Peter Manseau (“Call Waiting”). I’ll also be reading. The event is sponsored by Killing the Buddha, which published essays we read by Ashley Makar. The event is really in celebration of a book called […]

I am fortunate to have opportunities to read books before they are published, sometimes because I may want to write a piece of criticism, other times because I have a friend with a book coming out. Right now I’m thrilled to be reading three forthcoming books, Deborah Shapiro’s The Sun in Your Eyes (June 28), Daniel Reaburn’s Vessels (March 14), and Justine van der Leun’s We […]

Over the weekend and into this week I spent some time on a New Yorker blog I often read, Page-Turner, which has recently included a piece about New Directions Press by Maria Bustillos (whom we read in my David Foster Wallace class); one by Edwidge Danticat about James Baldwin (whose work we always read in my religion writing classes); […]