At the Paris Review, Kendra Allen shares the inspiration behind her new poetry collection, The Collection Plate, including her obsession with closely reading music lyrics. “I literally would not be writing anything if I was not obsessed with reading lyrics. I think that’s what sparked my interest in creative writing. So many of my greatest memories are me in the car listening to a specific song or me buying a CD and just replaying it over and over and over. […] Music has sustained me with something to write about. I can always find a line in any song and make a prompt out of it and apply it to my own life.
Into the Liner Notes with Kendra Allen
“Lyric Essay as Perversion”
“In the twenty-first century, the lyric essay at its worst is a utility or an app; at its best, it’s a cross-hatch of a genre in which things cross over; implicitly chiasmic, it’s a space in which incompatible discourses are allowed to intermingle; wherein poetry and prose create productive frictions, enabling a new, unnatural form, illegible and readable for the first time.” Mary Cappello writes about the lyric essay and Djuna Barnes.
Secret Space
Recommended Reading: Over at Aeon, Tiffany Jenkins writes about the importance of secrets for a child’s development and in children’s literature.
Interview with an Innkeeper
Some holiday cheer: John Scalzi offers up an interview with history’s most famous innkeeper.
The New Genre
Is Twitter an official literary genre? David Mitchell, Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood, and others take on the 140-character interface as a storytelling platform. Pair with our piece on the best of literary Twitter.
Remnick Interviewed
Robert Birnbaum has a terrific, funny, wide-ranging interview with David Remnick, a must read for all the New Yorker obsessives out there. (via Kottke)
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