Category: Culture

  • Interfictions goes online

    Another new development for 2013 is that Interfictions, the anthology series that Delia Sherman launched first with co-editor Theodora Goss and then with me as co-editor of the second volume, will be moving into an online incarnation, including poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and hybrids forms. Fiction editors are myself and Meghan McCarron. Nonfiction and poetry editor…

  • Map for a Forgotten Valley and 631

    Dear Locals (and those traveling nearby) who will be around Youngstown on February 15th.  I am giving a reading from my series of creative nonfiction vignettes called “Map for a Forgotten Valley”, along with a showing of Derek Jones’ short film “631”.  Here is a blurb of what the evening will look like.  Please click…

  • Reality Hunger

    I’m reading David Shields’ new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.  It’s a really engaging nonlinear, non narrative, at times lyrical essay, always structured by way of collage or mosaic, appropriating snippets of ideas from other writers, thinkers, poets, and philosophers and critics, arranging in a mash-up style, voices layered over one another without attribution (until…

  • When we are like Anne

    “Despite everything, I believe people are good at heart.” I’m so glad Anne Frank could believe this.  It’s a testament to her own goodness.  It is not a testament to human nature itself, though.  It tells us more about Anne than it does about ourselves. I don’t believe it.  I don’t attribute my disbelief to…

  • A repeal

    I hereby repeal my obviously premature congratulations to the state of Maine, which I gave out all too naively this past May. Now, instead, I’d like to say good luck to those Mainers who want a better, inclusive, love-supporting culture in which to exist for their and their children’s futures. I feel sorry for everyone,…

  • Running in the shadows

    An article from the NYT on the rise of teenaged runaways over the past few years, as the economy has worsened. It’s sad and, for me, recognizable.  One of the things I encountered every now and then when I was going around reading from my first novel, One for Sorrow, after its release a couple…

  • Outrage

    Author Nicola Griffith has blogged a call to action, which you can find here, in regards to a woman dying in the hospital whose same sex partner and children were not allowed by law to see her or receive any updates on her condition.  The hospital was later sued and the state awarded the hospital…

  • We’re getting ready

    If you’ve managed to forget that the second volume of Interfictions is being released later this fall, I certainly haven’t.  We’re getting ready to start posting our Annex stories online, as we lead up to the publication date of the book itself, but today, over at the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s website, you can already take…

  • A small taste of America in decline

    An interactive segmented video about my home region’s loss of industry over the past thirty years, and how it may now lose its very last major manufacturer in GM.  It’s very well made, though a sad reality, and one that is now in the new century becoming the reality of more and more communities in…

  • Stonewall at 40

    Rick Bowes writes a guest blog over at Matt Cheney’s blog The Mumpsimus, on Stonewall forty years later.  Read it.  It’s not only good, it’s a great perspective.