Melville came before Darwin

“I wanted to offer my students an alternative to the purely confessional mode. I wanted them to write about themselves without falling into a paralyzingly portentous tone. I wanted more humor in their work, more complexity, more detail, more balance—more good writing. I wanted fewer italicized passages, less use of the breathless present tense. I wanted no more tears in the workshop, no more embarrassing scenes.” Emily Fox Gordon writes about trauma narratives in the classroom, the trouble with writing as therapy, and the key differences between confessing and confiding in an essay for The American Scholar.

Among the better Tumblr memes is Read to Me Tuesday, which is exactly what it sounds like:  people choose a passage from a book, call in and read the passage over the phone.  The resulting posts are compiled under the hashtag #RTMT and often re-blogged by rtmt.tumblr.com.  As we see increased interest in social reading experiments like bookglutton.com,  RTMT shows how the web might make social connection through reading aloud a possibility for the first time since, well, story time.  Plus it’s really, really fun.

Our regular contributor Sonya Chung is interviewed in the latest issue of Bookslut, discussing her new book Long for This World. “I write novels because it’s a place where I can bring all of who I am, and what I know, and what I don’t know but want to know, into a coherent, created world.”

Recommended Reading: “Rabbit Starvation” by Alexandra Kleeman.