“I’m the one who gets asked, publicly, how I manage to write and teach and have three kids. Do you get those questions, or do people just assume there is a woman doing all of the homemaking so you can go upstairs and write?” Poets Tracy K. Smith and Gregory Pardlo discuss David Bowie vs. Elton John, the confessional vs. the abstract, and the balance between family and work. Also check out Sophia Nguyen’s Millions review of Smith’s new memoir, Ordinary Light.
Life on Earth
Our Ramshackle Universe
“I’m writing about people. Man involved in the human dilemma, facing the problems bigger than he, whether he licks them or whether they lick him. But man as frail and fragile as he is, yet he will keep on trying to be brave and honest and compassionate, and that, to me, is very fine and very interesting — and that is the reason I think any writer writes.” William Faulkner on why writers write in a rare recording from the University of Virginia, via Brain Pickings.
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Money, not ethics, ultimately motivates censorship
Ariel Bogle has a good round up over on Moby Lives about Paypal, Amazon, Apple, and censorship in publishing.
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Needs a Good Family
Seventy-two copies of One Story are looking for loving homes. Reader, will you be a dear and adopt a hungry short story?
Telling a beautiful lie
Chris Jones’s latest feature for Esquire wraps a copyright infringement case up in a meditation on the power of magic, the will to believe and the essence of the delight we can find in art. Warning: may lead you down an endless Penn & Teller YouTube rabbit hole.
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Steady As She Goes
“I prefer … to believe, in the weird and sometimes happy accidents that result—in this case—in kissing a beautiful stranger in the rain. It didn’t really change anything, but it wasn’t trivial. It was one of those encounters that rises up out of nowhere and sinks back into it, giving off light and energy as it goes.” Kim Addonizio’s new addition to Guernica’s “The Kiss” series is fantastic and life-affirming.
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