Pig-blood-flavored ice cream and Crispy Testicles anyone? Jennifer McLagan, Australian-born, Toronto-based author-chef, teaches us how to cook the rest of the animal in her new book, Odd Bits.
Odd Bits
To MFA or Not to MFA
The MFA rankings kerfuffle gets a contribution from Slate writer Scott Kenemore (which Roxane Gay promptly eviscerates), but this post appears to be the most level-headed assessment yet. (Last link via Hobart)
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“The Souls of Alligators”
Recommended Reading: Alligators of Abraham author Robert Kloss’s alliga-terrific story “The Souls of Alligators.”
How to Build a Book
“One Friday evening in March, I took the train to Columbia University and walked into one of the strangest and most interesting classes I’d ever seen. It was the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, part of the Mellon Visiting Artists and Thinkers Program at Columbia University School of the Arts, and a multimedia workshop in which writing students, quite literally, create architectural models of literary texts.”
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Charles Wright is Our New Poet Laureate
You can get acquainted with Charles Wright, the nation’s newest Poet Laureate, by checking out interviews he did with StorySouth and The Paris Review, and also by reading his work – much of which can be found online. Might I suggest this poem, which was published by the VQR?
Make Way for Native Excellence
“It’s about what they call Native Excellence — and creating a path to it with its own expectations and standards, instead of relying on those established by white academia or publishing.” BuzzFeed News wrote an in-depth feature on the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), which offers the US’s first indigenous-centered MFA program, Terese Marie Mailhot (author of Heart Berries: A Memoir), and Tommy Orange (author of There There). Read our interview with Marcie Rendon about writing a representative novel for today’s Native Americans.