April 21st, 2012
Thanks to Sarah Tsiang for this fun interview on Open Book. She’s the guest blogger there this month and has been interviewing many of the Susans featured in her upcoming anthology, Desperately Seeking Susan.
I’m delighted to be one of them.
March 16th, 2012
Spezzatino is a wonderful and innovative food magazine, almost entirely volunteer run, and edited by the redoubtable Krista Scott-Dixon, of Stumptuous fame. Gorgeous photography, terrific recipes, accurate nutritional information, and wonderful stories—what could be better? The fact that all the magazine’s proceeds go to the Healthy Food Bank foundation, that’s what. Please support this terrific venture by contributing your writing, subscribing, or giving a gift subscription to a foodie friend.
And here’s a little piece I wrote for them on Mr. Potato Head. mr-potato-head1
March 1st, 2012
So the contemporary essay is often to be seen engaged in acts of apparent anti-novelization: in place of plot, there is drift, or the fracture of numbered paragraphs; in place of a frozen verisimilitude, there may be a sly and knowing movement between reality and fictionality; in place of the impersonal author of standard-issue third-person realism, the authorial self pops in and out of the picture, with a liberty hard to pull off in fiction. That these anti-novelistic tricks are all, in fact, novelistic tricks, often borrowed from the history of the novel, does not muffle the pleasure of watching this literary freedom in action.
Still, it’s worth remembering that the essay has its own inescapable conventions, its own formulas, too. The attempt to evade convention eventually becomes conventional. If there is “novelization” and its clanking machinery, then there will also be “essayism” and its clanking machinery. The current liberties of the essay will doubtless look mannered in thirty years’ time; its vaunted self-consciousness will look naïve, the fractured forms quaint rather than radical.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/12/19/111219crbo_books_wood#ixzz1nt46rEkb
December 5th, 2011
“Style, I’ll define here, for my selfish purposes, as the verbal/lexical confirmation that I’m in the right relation to my impulses, my so-called material. “The right words in the right order”: style is the outer face of the inner impulse, its realization. It is not a frippery, an adornment, an excess. Style is the how of the what.”
October 19th, 2011
Today I’m the guest blogger at Canadian Bookshelf, the “the one-of-a-kind resource for discovering, discussing, and indulging in Canadian books.”
An excerpt:
Pity the essay—so undervalued that nobody recognizes it. We pass it by without a nod, or imagine we see it in a dozen other faces. “Ah, there you are! I’ve been looking for you! We must catch up,” we say, pumping a hand or slapping a rounded shoulder, all the while checking our watch in anticipation of our next appointment. Nobody wants to read the essay. Nobody wants to buy it. It’s so unpopular that in the 2012 Canada Reads—the first nonfiction edition ever—books of essays are explicitly ruled out.
