It’s throwback Tuesday with this little recording. Two years ago at Christmastime, the poet Elijah Burrell and I recorded “Gabriel’s Message,” and I still like how it came out. [box] Gabriel’s Message Vocals: Elijah Burrell, June Gervais (from a Basque folk carol) [/box] This song is a moment between a terrifying divine postman with fire-eyes and …
I was pretty mad at my husband this morning. Details not important. Level of anger important. I was at that stage where you get out the blankets for that spare bed in the basement. I was at the stage where I regarded every flattering social media post we’ve ever made about each other as the …
Perhaps you know that special suffocating effect of 763 toys? (By the way, this is Part 2 of a brief series called The Art of Deletion—editing a piece of writing down to its essential core.) It doesn’t matter how much you vow to raise your child in spacious, creative simplicity. Well meaning relatives cannot allow …
Our stories came back with Xs slashing out entire pages. The better pages were stripped of paragraphs. A line through a sentence began to seem mild. This was when I studied with a particularly vigorous writer/editor in the Bennington Writing Seminars. I requested him as a teacher, in part, because I wondered if I was up for it. I …
This week in The Common I reviewed a fabulously weird debut short story collection called Valparaiso, Round the Horn, by Madeline ffitch. And when a book is this rich in playful detail, it’s really challenging to choose just one title for your blog post. Rejected titles: Burning Your Grandfather’s Body × Feral Pigs and You × …
“Rule #11: I know that these rules will inevitably result in contradictions, conflicts, hypocrisy, and stress rashes.” —Sherman Alexie Yesterday Sherman Alexie wrote a marvelous response to a controversy about one of the poems he chose for Best American Poetry 2015–a poem ostensibly written by a Chinese poet, who turned out to be …