The latest issue of The Oxford American contains an essay I wrote about my family’s move to Florida in the early 1960s. The essay also recounts my own travels in the state, eventually back to the town where my family first lived, Starke. You can read the piece here; it’s called “Culture Shock.” Another essay of […]
In June 2017 I delivered a talk called “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story,” which is about what I see as the dubious place of empathy in the making of art. Over the past months, and in collaboration with Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, memoirist Daniel Raeburn, and […]
Today marks the first day of a new class at Eugene Lang College, Tutorial Advising: Writing in New York City, which I’m teaching alongside alumnus Alex Vadukul, regular contributor to The New York Times Metro section. Our first week’s reading is Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street.” For class next week, students will be creating […]
Today in Literary Journalism and American Belief, student writing and my recent reading of Emmanuel Carrére’s The Kingdom led me to discuss essays by Leslie Jamison, including “The Devil’s Bait,” “Giving Up the Ghost,” and “The March on Everywhere.” Because our major text is Jeff Sharlet’s Radiant Truths, I then made reference to a conversation between Jamison and Sharlet […]
We’re back into a new semester at Lang, and in conjunction with the New School’s Experience+Meaning orientation project, we’re reading Grace Paley’s “Travelling” this week in my First-Year Writing class, The Faith Between Us. Paley’s essay recounts two bus-trips, about fifteen years apart, and Paley’s own memories of those travels. In the first, which takes place in […]
This week, the arts and politics website Guernica is running a new piece from me about kissing. The essay details my relationship with my young and growing son. The image above is from B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures, which I’ve read a million times and which I write a little about in this piece, “Misskiss.”
In advance of our Grace Paley event on April 20, Literary Hub is running an essay from me about teaching writing over the past decade: “Something More Than Correctness.” I lean heavily on Paley’s wisdom about teaching. Here’s a snippet: Grace Paley presents a challenge for the teacher of young writers (especially the young teacher of young writers): […]
In Fall 2017, the First-Year Writing Program will launch the Grace Paley Teaching Fellowship, a semester-long residency. The fellowship will recognize a writer of considerable achievement, in any genre, whose work also reveals a concern for social justice. The Fellowship honors Grace Paley, whose commitment to the arts and activism is a model for the writer in our moment. Applications […]
This week, Longreads published a talk I gave in early January about the particular challenges and opportunities writers face over the next four years. I called the speech “Writing Our America.” It’s about politics, and it’s also what you might call political. The speech opens with a discussion of an essay I often teach at Lang, David Foster Wallace’s “Deciderization—2007,” and […]
I’ve begun the spring semester teaching my food-writing course, Setting a Fine Table. This week we read the wonderful Jane Kramer essay “The Reporter’s Kitchen.” I’m mainly drawn to this essay for the way Kramer discusses her relationship with the subjects she writes about, how in the midst of cooking she gains perspective on what she’s learned in her […]
