In Person
August 30, 2012
Keeping the Faith: Ten Days at Bread Loaf 13
by Michael Bourne
The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the oldest and most prestigious of its kind in the country, is a curious mix of summer camp, trade convention, and religious retreat.
August 17, 2012
The Writing Life: From Beirut and Cambodia to New York, Florida, and Parts Unknown 8
by Nathan Deuel
It wasn’t easy. I wanted to finish a book. Be a good dad. Get an MFA. Be a good husband. I’d lined up a teaching job at a university in Beirut. Got an essay in a publication that might impress you. Called my mom as much as I could. I couldn’t call my dad, he was dead. When do you know if it’s actually starting to add up, when you can say, OK, yes, this is real, it’s actually happening.
July 13, 2012
A Night at The Moth: The Worst Thing that Ever Happened to Me 8
by Kevin Hartnett
Why it is that people gravitate to the most tragic or dramatic moments of their lives when given a chance to tell a story? There are, I think, two reasons.
June 27, 2012
#LitBeat: Funny and Dirty in San Francisco 1
by Lydia Kiesling
Sheila Heti took the stage last, and told us that she would be dirty. And how. Reading from her new book about a divorced feminist playwright, Heti selected what can only be the dirtiest bits, an extended sex party between the protagonist and an artist named Israel.
June 15, 2012
Literary Tourism: At Suttree’s High Gravity Beer Tavern 6
by Nina Martyris
Matt and Anne have also been asked, hopefully, if their menu has a melon cocktail. The disappointing answer is no. The melon has an exalted place in the novel because of a ridiculous but tender scene in which a young botanical pervert call Gene Harrogate steals into the fields by nights, shucks off his overalls, and begins to mount melons in the soil.
June 8, 2012
Outside the Box: From Teaching to Tea Parties 6
by Edra Ziesk
I could hear it in her voice when we spoke, her panic. She didn’t know what to do. She’d put in time and money to get that degree, there was supposed to be work at the end of it, and there wasn’t.