Baron Wormser: Greening
The contest between Trump and Biden represents an allegory come to life of the two forms of consciousness: one candidate who espouses a derisive and divisive let-it-rip individualism that is indifferent to, among other things, truth, and one candidate who has spent a lifetime ministering to the needs of the Corporate State.
Video: Frazetta & Conan | Biography of an Icon
Join Sara Frazetta as she uncovers the roots of Conan’s tale, tracing his evolution from Howard’s literary imagination to Frazetta’s powerful illustrations.
Baron Wormser: After Poetry Month
The poet tries to be canny while practicing an uncanny art.
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.
Angele Ellis: “no margin on these pages of skin history”
In Every Hard Sweetness, Sheila Carter-Jones weaves a personal and cultural history of racism into poetry.
Baron Wormser: Prisoners of Virtue
Although the less-than-virtuous, the Toms and Hucks of this world, are constant threats—and thus the grounds for unremitting vigilance, if not outright alarmism—the posse of the virtuous remains snug and smug. Inwardly, they are rigid as dress parade soldiers standing at dutiful attention. Goodness is theirs.
Emily Cataneo: A New Chapter in the Quest for a Longer Life
In “Why We Die,” biologist and Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan explores the science of aging and life extension.
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.
John Zheng | Valediction: Poems and Prose by Linda Parsons
Parsons’s contemplation moves from shaping garden beds to shaping life. Garden is an island of necessity where her “orbits in and out of the perennial beds” have shaped her life for thirty years.
Dion O’Reilly: Luke Johnson’s Heroic Journey
Luke Johnson’s debut poetry collection portrays a dream world linked to a stark reality, where generational trauma is recognized as an artifact of mind, a collection of leaping memories that haunt and possess.
Baron Wormser: Vistas
I don’t doubt that somewhere in the United States some class or reading group, as a way of girding their collective loins for the upcoming election, is reading or rereading Democratic Vistas, an 1871 essay in which Walt Whitman surveyed American democracy’s prospects.
Mike Vargo: Is There a Real Me?
Believing in a real self would be easier if the self were not so inconsistent.
Michael Simms: Writing Prompts #9 and #10 | Find Your Inner Dragon
In this session, we’ll experiment with employing familiar tropes in new ways.
Baron Wormser: Disunited Delusions
Donald Trump, as an unrestrained American ego, seems like an allegorical figure of the sort that Melville had a fondness for—the Confidence Man, par excellence.
