Uncategorized – Page 6 – The Trailer Park MFA

Terror and Hope

“Make art from the places that terrify you,” my artistic mentor, Amy O, said this time last year. And it has proven good advice. Most of us have a lot of things that terrify us, and that turns out to be a good thing. If you’re an artist. But a surprising thing happens when youContinue reading “Terror and Hope”

The Dying Leaf Is The Most Beautiful

“Life isn’t so great.” A friend says. “I’m sick of people trying to be cheerful about everything. Trying to pretend their lives are great and perfect and posting that all over social media. Rather than presenting themselves and their lives as they are. In all their complexity. With all their sides–good and bad.” And she’sContinue reading “The Dying Leaf Is The Most Beautiful”

Be Still, and Listen

I sat at my desk today running my fingers through my hair with frustration. “Ack! Why isn’t this working?” I was telling myself there was this scene I had to write. A middle-aged deputy returns to an isolated farming community where he was unable to close a case twenty years ago. Stumbling upon a chanceContinue reading “Be Still, and Listen”

I’m Not There

What does it mean to have had a home once–and then to give it up? I mean, who does that? And why? And how can you know it will turn out all right? “It gets better,” a friend told me when I first left. “It has to.” I said at New Year’s. But you neverContinue reading “I’m Not There”

Art: What Is It Good for?

So a student came into the writing center with a poem in hand: Maxine Kumin’s “Henry Manley, Living Alone, Keeps Time.” Her professor had forced her to read it, and now she had to write an essay about it. “And I hate poetry,” she said. But as we talked about the poem, I could seeContinue reading “Art: What Is It Good for?”

Ex-Mormon, Book-Shelver Girl

So here we go, people. I’m going to blog my way through the year—365 days of it. One blog for every day. Call me crazy, and you’d be right. I guess I should start off by introducing myself. I’m 31. I’m a one-time published author… but we don’t talk about that. Poems of teenage angstContinue reading “Ex-Mormon, Book-Shelver Girl”

The Virtue of Waiting

Gail Sheehy, journalist and author, once wrote, “Growth demands a temporary surrender of security,” and waiting perhaps requires the greatest surrender. Because, in waiting, we face the truth that we are not in control. And we associate this, in the western world, with passivity. Nothing could be further from the truth. We wait to beContinue reading “The Virtue of Waiting”

On the Usefulness of Art-Making

In lecture halls and galleries and college art departments, people make extravagant claims about the importance of art and artists–how necessary these are, how the human spirit could not exist without them. Pish-posh. In the real world, it is the artist who benefits. Art is a byproduct of a free society, and its usefulness comesContinue reading “On the Usefulness of Art-Making”

Susan Minot’s Evening

From that synesthetic description of the suitcase (“a smooth shellacked surface with yellow stitching underneath the glaze…Ann Lord could almost taste the surface of it at the back of her throat.”) and the initial car ride, dizzying with the thrill of sexual magnetism and New England summer, I knew I was in the hands ofContinue reading “Susan Minot’s Evening”

Review of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Much as in her collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, the emotional force of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, depends upon the silence of her characters. As the protagonist’s mother Ashima enters labor in the opening pages, she refrains from calling out her husband’s name, which she views as “something intimate and therefore unspoken.”Continue reading “Review of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri”