Rise of the Ghost Machines
You’d think two centuries would be long enough for us to sort the singer from the song, to divine where the soul ends and our machines begin. You’d think wrong.
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The Path Is No Path: On Not Becoming a Poet
What makes a poet a poet? There is of course no simple answer. You could argue that self-declaration is enough. You could also argue there must be a measure.
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The Haunted Writing Life of John Polidori
Polidori is simultaneously unknown but influential, a failure but also the progenitor of an enduring literary trope: the vampire.
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To All the Novels I Never Published
Any given piece of writing must be categorized: the ones you keep, and the ones you share.
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What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley
Shelley saw himself as a conduit for the electricity of the universe.
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The Original Fire: On Mary Shelley and Creativity
Shelley chose to record her thoughts only with great care.
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Shelf Life: On the Stories Our Books Tell About Us
My bookshelves remind me of where I’ve been, who I am, and what it’s taken to get here.
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Origin Stories: On the Value of Comics
The world is vast and I'm unsure of how it works, but this comic is mine, and that's enough.
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The Kindest Cut: On Rejection
I've learned to endure and find humor in the face of rejection, and this has brought me closer to mastering the art of failure.
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Silent All These Years: On Annie Dillard
The way we talk about Annie Dillard makes me sad and afraid. Sad because we're unable to appreciate her work if we can't see how she is just one of us. And afraid because affixing someone with otherness is the first stage in allowing that someone to be forgotten.
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The Case for ‘War and Peace’ and Rereading
This reading journey made me the person I am. Gave me perspective. Helped me to understand the narrative of my own life. And now at midlife I am beginning to see how the record of this intellectual travel fades.
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For the Relief of Unbearable Bookstores
The unforgivable sin of bookstores is this: so many of the books that they offer are physical reminders of passing time.
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Extinguishing the Self: On Robert Stone
Stone's work reads as if it were composed to the tune of clanging blacksmiths and left to cool under the stars somewhere far from land. This is the conundrum of good writing. It can take you anywhere.
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The Ghost in My Hands: On Reading Digital Books
The virtual bookshelf on my Kindle is a list of titles that I've read but never held. These books are just ideas, abstractions, nothing less, nothing more.
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The Things My Books Carried
In 'The Stranger' by Albert Camus: A greeting card and a blank envelope. The card has a cartoon king on the cover and inside it says, “You rule!” There is nothing else written anywhere.
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One More for the River: On Writing Challenges
My grad school mentor, the brooding and kind-hearted author David Plante, would sometimes refer to unsuccessful books as “one more for the river.” As a student in his twenties with a chartless ocean of writing challenges ahead, this metaphor made me uneasy because I so desperately wanted to arrive somewhere with my work.
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Reading Together Even While Reading Alone
You cannot remove a book from the List until you’ve read it entirely—because until the last paragraph, anything can happen.
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Chasing the Light: On Not Quitting the Writing Life
What is it that can still seize me, after years of failure, and make me seek to write, to make art? I have no idea. All I know is that I do not have it in me to give up.
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