Category: Columns

Mythic Humor and Personal Vendettas: Kansastan by Farooq Ahmed

By Couri Johnson In his new novel Kansastan, Farooq Ahmed mixes dystopia with myth, the Old West with the Old Testament, and creates a narrative that is full of both humor and dread. His un-named narrator, a goatherd abandoned at a mosque in war-torn Kansas, both garners the sympathy of readers while repulsing them.
My Body is Bound: The Inevitability of Auto-Theory for this Creative Writer

By Em Tielman Auto-Theory is a contemporary form of writing said to blend critical theories with personal [embodied] experience. Think of the fiction workshop adage “write what you know” amended to “write what you directly sense with what you suspect to be true” and you may begin to conceive of how this blending occurs.
Spiritual Expression Through the Persona Poem

by Patti Jeane Pangborn I have always been drawn to works of literature that deal with some aspect of spirituality, such as writings about religious figures, sacred spaces, mystical symbols, or writings that feature a character’s relationship to their spiritual beliefs.
The Writer’s Costume: An Interview with Deborah Reed

by Jenny Robertson When I was finishing up an MFA in fiction at Pacific University, I had a vivid writing dream: all of my teachers — each one a published and respected writer — were playing in a pond. They jumped in, splashed around, climbed back out, then did it all over again. Each of…
The Longer I Look

By Britton Andrews There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it’s well to remember…
Solving a Puzzle vs. Creating a Puzzle

By Ali Ünal In his book Telling Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative, Michael Roemer sets out to find the roots of traditional storytelling. His main argument is that traditional story has relied on characters taking action even though such acts, from time to time, may prove to be ineffective. It is, however,…
On Not Writing and How We Always Already Are

By Wes Jamison I began to follow Writing About Writing on Facebook when I redesigned my English 101 course. We entered the class focusing on what we learn about writing when we pay attention to what writers say about writing, both the noun and the verb, and how they learned to do it. I thought…
Shome Dasgupta Conveys Louisiana’s Rich Culture in Poetic Prose

by Jake Brewer Some fiction writers focus on character, others on plot, still others on fleshing out the regional location of their work—this setting, in turn, becoming a character as much as any other. Shome Dasgupta manages to focus on all three of these aspects in his short novel Pretend I Am Someone Like You,…
On Poetry, Politics, and the Poet as Witness

by Patti Pangborn On October 18, poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch delivered his lecture “Poetry and the Problem of Politics” as part of the annual Flora Plonsky Levy Lecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Kirsch explored how politics can both inspire poets and shape the way we read poetry, examining Percy Bysshe…
Interview: Whit Bolado

By: Gina Warren Whit Bolado is a fiction and nonfiction writer from Georgia whose work has appeared in Duende and Underground, the undergraduate literary journal of Georgia State University. His most recent publication, “What We Know of Them,” a story about relationships, change, and the function of collective voices, appeared in the Winter 2018 Issue…