Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Every November, a remarkable thing happens. Several hundred thousand people who have decided they are going to write a novel sit down at kitchen tables, in libraries, in coffee shops, and in offices a...
Read article →Literary magazines have always been less about the literature than their titles suggest and more about the particular gathering of people who produced them and the readers who found them. The magazine...
Read article →Something new has been built in the publishing landscape over the last fifteen years, and it does not yet have a settled name or a fully stable shape. "Indie publishing" is the working term, but it en...
Read article →The solo creative practice is a kind of mythology that creative culture maintains about itself. We imagine the writer in their room, the painter alone with the canvas, the composer hearing music that...
Read article →Gallery openings are frequently criticized as social performance with art as backdrop. The criticism is not entirely wrong. There are openings where the work is incidental to the networking, where the...
Read article →There is a specific kind of terror that belongs to the open mic. Not the terror of formal performance — the recital, the stage — but something more naked and domestic. You are in a bar, or a coffee sh...
Read article →A good mentor gives you something that no class can give and no book can give and no amount of solitary practice can give: the experience of being seen clearly by someone who has gone further along th...
Read article →Folk tales do not explain themselves. They present a situation, move through it with a kind of compressed momentum, and arrive at an outcome that the listener is expected to interpret without much ass...
Read article →The writing workshop is one of the stranger institutional inventions of the twentieth century. Gather a group of people who all want to be writers, give one of them a story to defend, ask the others t...
Read article →Nobody beats the Norse gods. This is not a statement about superiority so much as a structural observation: the Norse mythological system is built around inevitable defeat. Ragnarok is not a possibili...
Read article →There is a moment in autumn when the light changes in a way that produces a specific feeling for which English has no word. Japanese does. Mono no aware — sometimes translated as "the pathos of things...
Read article →Some critique groups make writers. Others unmake them. The difference rarely has to do with the technical skill of the participants or the quality of the work being discussed. It has to do with the ps...
Read article →In the villages of West Africa, the griot was indispensable in a way that no single professional in contemporary life quite maps onto. Not a journalist, not a priest, not a musician, not an archivist...
Read article →Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment" arrived in 1976 and became one of the most controversial books about children's literature ever published. Bettelheim argued that classic fairy tales — vio...
Read article →Dreamtime is not the past. This is perhaps the most important thing to understand before approaching Aboriginal Australian storytelling traditions, and it is the point most often flattened by outsider...
Read article →Scheherazade never finishes. This is the mechanism at the heart of One Thousand and One Nights, and it is more radical than it initially appears. The frame story — Shahryar, the king who executes his...
Read article →We know the body in a particular way through touch that we cannot know it through sight. A photograph of your own hand tells you what it looks like. Holding a piece of clay you have shaped with that h...
Read article →The Greek gods are difficult to love and nearly impossible to respect, which is exactly why they have proven so durable as psychological material. Zeus is unfaithful, vain, and thunderously self-right...
Read article →Collage is a form of radical honesty. You cannot make a collage from nothing — you must start with what exists, with the real images that the real world has produced, with paper that has already been...
Read article →The seanchaí was never simply a storyteller. In the townlands of rural Ireland, where the hearth fire burned low and neighbors gathered after dark, the seanchaí occupied a role that merged memory, com...
Read article →Clay is one of the oldest materials human beings have worked with. Older than weaving, older than metalwork, older than writing. We have been shaping it with our hands for roughly thirty thousand year...
Read article →In many Indigenous cultures across the world, the question "who are you?" cannot be answered by a name alone. It requires a story. The story includes your people, your land, your relationships, your o...
Read article →I missed the moon for about six years. It was up there every night, going through its reliable phases, and I was looking at screens. This is not a complaint about screens — screens are fine, screens c...
Read article →My grandmother knit without looking. This is the detail I remember most clearly: her hands moving with the yarn, needles clicking in a quiet rhythm, while her eyes were on the television or on the fac...
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