Baron Wormser: Complicity | On Alice Munro
Munro has been likened to Chekhov but if one is looking at Russians the pertinent one seems to me to be Dostoevsky.
Video: Earthsea | What the Original Wizard School Got Right
What are the literary origins of the boy wizard and the wizard school? This video takes us on an adventure through 20th century fantasy literature to explore the roots of this trope, the connection between Lord of the Rings, Earthsea and Harry Potter, and how race, feminism, gay wizards and bi witches feature in this universe.
Video: The Watchmaker
Finding chaos and precision in all things – a philosophy of watchmaking.
Elizabeth Gargano: How Parables Teach Us Who We Are
Octavia Butler’s novel begins in what then seemed a distant future, our current year of 2024. Lauren Olamina, the novel’s protagonist, leads a ragged band of followers through an America that is coming apart at the seams.
Richard Hoffman: Uncle and the Donkey Cart
One day Uncle came upon a donkey and cart, driverless, stopped in the road.
Michael Simms: Writing Prompts #9 and #10 | Find Your Inner Dragon
In this session, we’ll experiment with employing familiar tropes in new ways.
Michael Simms: The Song
The young man and the older woman met at an artist’s colony. They were both in the habit of walking on the wooded paths in the afternoon, so they began … Continue reading
David Kirby: Golden Gate by Clarence Major (Review)
A new world is rising, and for the most part these stories read like field reports about earthlings to an alien race.
Video: The Agent
A C-list talent agent walks through the world all but invisible… until he enters a pay-to-play audition room.
Michael Simms: Orpheus in Hollywood
Michael Chabon hasn’t so much straddled genres as rejuvenated whatever he touches, making literary fiction more engaging and accessible and popular genres less cliched and formulaic.
Michael Simms: The Witch’s Tower (excerpt)
~ the first two pages of a bound manuscript composed by the philosopher Linnaeus of Iskar in the reign of Ottolo the Befuddled; the rest of the manuscript being illegible having been damaged by water
Joan E. Bauer: It Takes a Lifetime
They’d both mastered the ‘poetics of place,’
small-town Mississippi and post-war California.
Welty believed & surely Macdonald agreed:
‘No art ever came from not risking your neck.’
Video: “The Tub” by Amy Hempel (with text)
My heart—I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God.
Michael Simms: A Commentary on the Saga of Milon Redshield
By Tatatungia the witch, known as The Wanderer, visiting the court of Queen Oleanna Vth