An Evening with William Burroughs

by Richard Goodman

Originally published on April 14, 2008

We all got up to leave, and immediately someone was reaching for Burroughs’ coat, while someone else went for his hat. After one person had helped him put on his coat and another had given him his hat, he turned to me and said with a wry smile, “Around here, I’m known as ‘The Don’.”

Death in Life, Life After Death, and the Novelist

by Barry Blumenfeld

Originally published on October 26, 2007

“…To be an ambitious writer–I am one–is to be involved in all sorts of troubles particular to the category, including the ones I’ve mentioned. I will not be advising you how to cope with them. I don’t know how to cope with them. What I do is suffer them, like everybody else.”

innovative fiction as liquid architecture

by Lance Olsen

Originally published on July 30, 2007

“Perhaps an equally important question is how might we bring such amphibious notions out of the realm of abstraction and into the praxis of the creative-writing workshop, thereby inviting students to explore such possibility spaces themselves.”

The Runner’s Anxiety

by Arthur Saltzman

Originally published on June 2, 2006

Like the fellow who makes a living selling women’s lingerie, an English
professor must make a conscious effort to ensure that the pleasures that
inspired him to choose his career do not decline into mere duties. Woe to
the teacher who discovers that the novels and poems that once aroused his
passions now wait for him like so much laundry to be folded. For the
chief feature of recreation is that it is not required — a mandatory
vacation from work is a lay-off by that or any other name.

PIF: A Stay of Execution for an Online Literary Treasure

by Thomas E. Kennedy

Originally published on March 1, 2006

The author of, among others, The Literary Traveler (with Walter Cummins), Thomas E. Kennedy sets out to answer the question “What is PIF?”.

Fast Forward: Confessions of a Porn Screenwriter

by Eric Spitznagel

Originally published on February 1, 2002

“Listen, just write the script, get some quick cash, and that’ll be the end of it. Who knows, it may be fun.”
I had to admit, she was on to something.

Sitting Danny Rolling

by Richard Weems

Originally published on January 4, 2002

I hung in the folds,
too new to the area to chance grazing the fields alone. This was home of the Grand Poobah of
the nation’s largest chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. This was gator country.

Impostors

by Arthur Saltzman

Originally published on November 1, 2001

The art is in the execution. Three or four players are optimal, but in a pinch, two are sufficient to perpetrate the game. The key here, as in so many things, is to play swiftly and assuredly, for expertise is its own enchantment and disguise. Cards should be snapped confidently down and winning tricks, finesses, [...]

The Art of Windows

by Diane Greco

Originally published on July 1, 2001

My mother, a painter, once sketched me an eight-pane window looking out on a garden. Just above her signature, she inscribed a dedication along with a tag-line: “We get to do the windows.” The sketch, which hung on my bedroom wall beside my actual window throughout my adolescence, was a feminist inside joke and an [...]

But Is It Art?

by Michael Dunaway

Originally published on August 1, 1999

Art is a funny thing. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, one man’s Philip Glass is another man’s clanging cymbal, and one man’s bold new post-structuralist statement is another man’s chicken scratch on a canvas.