Sketches of AWP 2013 Strangest encounter in Boston: a gentleman stops by the booth and commences speaking at about a thousand RPM while waving a book he’s written, making claims of various famous friends including the Dalai Lama. One of... Read More

Last night a friend emailed her experience of AWP, a note which read like a manic manifesto of the upcoming writer. This might say less about my friend than it does about the nature of AWP as it erupts into... Read More

Here we go again, sliding into the book vortex known as the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, or AWP. This year’s cluster-duck quacks to life in 3 weeks up in Boston, where the wompus will nest (amongst other places)... Read More

A friend who works at the last remaining big box chain bookstore in our region tells me she spends most of her day doing work which brings in not one red cent for that company. The chain has focused largely... Read More

Teju Cole tweeted seven flash fictions about drone strikes. The second one begins, “Call me Ishmael.” This is an off-shoot of his small fates twitter project. Richard Blanco is our first Hispanic, first openly gay, youngest ever inaugural poet. I was talking with... Read More

This was the worst flight of my life. That’s what a woman was saying, loudly, as we disembarked last night, blessedly back home in Cleveland, in the middle of the storm. Then she told her friend how she would write... Read More

Maybe you’ve heard of The Next Big Thing, the latest spin on an old time chain letter. It’s a blog chain that’s circulating in which a writer answers ten prefab interview questions about a current project, then tags a handful... Read More

For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge is an article by Randy Faucheux in Dig: Baton Rouge Uncovered about a new Lavender Ink anthology and its editor, Vincent Cellucci. Because of the book’s title (and maybe its all-puns-intended content?) Fuck Poems has encountered some... Read More

Some of the debate about the movie Django Unchained goes right past me. I don’t think the problem is use of the n word. I think it’s the choice of subject matter and the manner in which that subject is... Read More

A friend was startled, because of the old superstition, when I mentioned that one of my cats is black. I’ve heard a couple people making hay out of the new year ending in 13, another locus of superstitious fear. Somebody... Read More