Issue 101 | October 2010
"I think the point to a story, or any creative endeavor really, is to work through your questions and try and reach some sort of conclusion. I don’t see that art is any different from science. We build our knowledge of the world by constantly offering possible answers, or visions of the world, and pass the baton on to the next generation."
by
Martyn Pedler
I do not believe that only poets read contemporary poetry, but I do believe that all curious and serious readers of contemporary poetry are reading to steal. We want to steal technique, mood, vocabulary, experience. All reading is stealing -- but poetry readers are going a little further, maybe, are thrill-seeking, pursuing a potentially synesthesic change of the brain.
by
Olivia Cronk
"After Marilyn Monroe died there were a bunch of copycat suicides by young women. One woman wrote this in her suicide note: 'If the most beautiful thing in the world has no reason to live, what hope can there be for the rest of us?' I think this is a valid question."
by
Elizabeth Hildreth
Among the many excellent reasons to study history -- natural history, unnatural history -- is to remind ourselves that prevailing beliefs in any given culture at any given moment are usually batshit crazy. At best, they are optional, but they are almost never harmless. They often delude us and limit us.
by
Elizabeth Bachner
Books, to me, are not just books. They are creatures, relatives, friends. They are private traveling companions, with whom I have long conversations. I feel them emotionally; I like or dislike them in the way I might like or dislike a stranger at a bar.
by
Pauls Toutonghi
I am terrible at writing about places, and that's because I'm terrible at being in them. I think I have a problem with the proposition or maybe the preposition. I don't feel like I'm in places. I think I'm at them.
by
Ben Greenman
I’m hardly alone in this sense that it takes incredible energy just to resist being engulfed by culture’s great forces. It’s become thoroughly unremarkable to feel stoop-shouldered with work, glassy-eyed from the assault of information’s flow through electronic outlets, and snared, if only momentarily, by the fast-moving consumer currents in which last year’s big screen TV or iPod Touch suddenly goes lame alongside a 3D TV or Nano.
by
Barbara J. King
"The world of my novel isn’t all that different from our world today. With the health care system as broken as it is, and with the kind of intense mistrust of government we see in America today, and the tendency of people in power to put financial gain ahead of the pubic good, it’s pretty scary to think just how bad things could get."
by
Melynda Fuller
"A lot of conservatives are very committed to a populist, grassroots understanding of their movement. And the book, I think, shows the limits of that approach if you really want to understand the structure of the conservative movement. So I think there is something in it that is likely troubling to many conservatives, and the hostile responses it has received probably reflect that."
by
Mariya Strauss
"My younger kid is in fourth grade and I was picking him up from his second day of school a few days ago...as these kids were waiting for their parents to pick them up, maybe 90 percent of them were on their handheld devices. You’re so not in the world when you live like that. It’s not that I don’t see all the richness and value we gain from all this technology, but there’s a cautionary tale there."
by
Emily Wilson
"Honestly, I don’t know how overly conscious I was (at least early on) of the juxtaposition of violence and beauty in the book -- in the quest to be both accurate and vivid, that was just the world that emerged on the page, if that makes sense."
by
Pauls Toutonghi
