I’ve wanted to be a publisher since I was ten years old. It was then that I produced my first, very limited editions, folding sheets of construction paper into folios I stitched or glued together. Whether I filled them with my own drawings and poems, or passages of my father’s favorite books, I loved the…
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A Great Poetry Magazine Turns 120: The Poet Lore Birthday Party
Writers love to talk about what a thick skin it takes to do what we do, and how quickly inured to rejection we become. Don’t believe a word of it. Whether it comes in a form letter or personally scribbled note with the encouragement to “send more,” every returned submission has its own particular bite….
My Summer Reading
May 31, 2009 I’ve never been one for light reading in the summer. With my teaching duties suspended, summer is the time when I can read purely for myself. When the hot sun beckons — if there is such a thing as reincarnation, I must have been a sun-worshipper in a past life —…
How the New Age Movement Drove Me to the National Hockey League
With the National Hockey League kicking off its All-Star Weekend today in Montreal, I’m feeling sentimental about my own introduction to the great game of hockey, detailed below. I originally wrote this piece for the for the Spring 2003 issue of SportsFan Magazine, a print and online sports journal founded by James J. Patterson, a…
Books by Grace Cavalieri and Sam Truitt
On Sunday, I had the pleasure of introducing two great poets in a reading at the Writer’s Center: Sam Truitt, whose most recent collection, Vertical Elegies, is really three books in one, and Grace Cavalieri, whose most recent collection, Anna Nicole, retells and reimagines the life of Anna Nicole Smith. Some of the audience members…
A Great Big Mind and an Even Bigger Heart
A Great Big Mind and an Even Bigger Heart: David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008 It has been a month since David Foster Wallace took his own life, but the fact that he is gone is still as shocking and sad and painful to me as it was when I first heard of it. Since the…