Making of a Poem: Leopoldine Core on “Ex-Stewardess”
Leopoldine Core’s aura photo, courtesy of the author. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Leopoldine Core’s “ Ex-Stewardess ” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a […]
Q & A with Josephine Cameron
As owner and music educator at her Songwriting for Kids studio in Brunswick, Maine , Josephine Cameron takes her students through different musical genres and eras, teaching them how to play instruments, write songs, and embrace their creativity. When she’s not teaching, singing, playing the piano, or writing songs and poems, Cameron writes novels about […]
Oblivion Beckons: On Thomas Ligotti’s “Pictures of Apocalypse”
The beautiful is always bizarre. —Charles Baudelaire A SUI GENERIS strangeness suffuses the work of Thomas Ligotti, lingering like an ancient air—odd or archaic choices of vocabulary; prose set to an uncommon rhythm and canted cadences to keep you unsettled; a pervasive chill of nihilism; and ambiguities, awful and awesome, creeping along the caliginous corridors […]
Let’s Talk About the Bathroom Scene
Bodily functions rarely get the spotlight in fiction and poetry. But for some writers, they drive action and help create indelible characters. The infamous men’s room at the now-defunct music club C.B.G.B. in Manhattan.Credit…GODLIS June 26, 2023, 5:01 a.m. ET Alfred Hitchcock once told François Truffaut he wanted to make a film that would examine […]
Diana Goetsch on How Elena Ferrante and Milan Kundera Helped Her Write a Memoir
In This Body I Wore, I’d set out to write a pre -transition literary memoir, which in my case meant capturing the lived reality of being trans and not knowing it, for fifty years. Capturing an experience is very different from explaining it. To explain it would be to impose a current understanding onto a […]
Let’s Talk About the Bathroom Scene
Bodily functions rarely get the spotlight in fiction and poetry. But for some writers, they drive action and help create indelible characters. The infamous men’s room at the now-defunct music club C.B.G.B. in Manhattan.Credit…GODLIS Alfred Hitchcock once told François Truffaut he wanted to make a film that would examine a city entirely through food and, […]