Hilary Plum
Out loud
Through periods of illness I have recently taken to listening to books on tape. I know they’re not “on tape,” but I can’t help but use that phrase: bound by childhood, when my parents loaded in cassette after cassette of…
Taking back the sponge cake & other adventures
This post should come with a dateline: Seattle. This weekend I was lucky enough to go to my first reading at the legendary Elliott Bay Books. Four great poets—Zach Savich (KR’s own), Andy Stallings, Melanie Noel, and Sierra Nelson—read work…
Writing nature: On Melanie Rae Thon’s “The Voice of the River”
In a recent interview, novelist Lance Olsen describes one of the endeavors of his just-released Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing: I spend one chapter talking about how conventional notions of characterization are essentially Freudian in nature in that they…
Performing justice
Last week I was one of many Americans who unwittingly clicked through to the “new” Bank of America website and was, for a moment, completely taken in. “Dear Fellow American,” the website announces as one arrives at it, in a…
Literature and home
This past weekend I had the great pleasure of attending the 12th annual Juniper Literary Festival at UMass Amherst. A homecoming of sorts, since I received an MFA from UMass Amherst and, why not own up to it, a BA…
