Open Throat by Henry Hoke
Henry Hoke reads from the opening of his novel Open Throat, published in June 2023 by MCD.
World-Building in Arizona
The Worldbuilding Initiative, a new public-facing program at Arizona State University, uses ideas and skills from creative writing to encourage participants to take an active role in imagining a more equitable and sustainable future.
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Happy Birthday by Hannah Sullivan
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“The first half having been / given up to space, I decided / to devote my remaining life to time, this thing we live / on fishily or on like moss,” reads Hannah Sullivan from her poem “Happy Birthday,” which appears in her collection Was It for This, in this Faber & Faber video featuring photographs and archival footage.
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Charged by Imagination
“The poem is an opportunity to turn from memoiristic transcription of information towards a kind of ultimate artifact, charged and changed by the imagination,” says Ocean Vuong about his approach to storytelling in this interview by Kadish Morris for the Guardian. Vuong offers his poem “American Legend” as an example in which the speaker drives his father to put down their dog and crashes the car, which becomes “a kind of parable for American failure.” In actuality, Vuong does not drive but uses the story to consider relationships between fathers and sons. Inspired by this concept of imaginative writing, write a poem that deliberately alters an event in your life. How can your expansion of this event make for a deeper parable?
Garth Greenwell and Maggie Millner
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Maggie Millner reads from her debut poetry collection, Couplets: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), and Garth Greenwell reads from his forthcoming novel currently titled Small Rain for this reading and conversation moderated by Meghan O’Rourke at Yale University as part of the Yale Review’s Spring 2023 Literary Festival.
Pass the Mic: New Directions in Poetics
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In this event hosted by Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, poets and professors Erica Hunt, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Matthew Shenoda, and Mary-Kim Arnold share their work and discuss their creative processes in a conversation moderated by Lisa Biggs.
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Catherine Lacey and Miriam Toews at 92Y
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Catherine Lacey reads from her latest novel, Biography of X (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), and Miriam Toews reads from her latest novel, Fight Night (Bloomsbury, 2021), in this Christopher Lightfoot Walker Reading Series event at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
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Best Friends Forever
National Best Friend Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated on June 8 in the United States and Canada. The holiday has no official designation nor any real origin; in fact, according to a 2015 Washington Post article, this hashtag holiday likely began with the website EarthCalendar.net, which takes submissions to catalog “lesser-known holidays.” National Best Friend Day eventually caught the eye of morning TV shows, flower delivery services, and even the American Kennel Club which helped bring it to the mainstream. In honor of this invented holiday, write an essay about the best friends who have come into your life. From your childhood recess buddy to your work bestie, try to communicate what makes each one distinctly special.
Isabel Allende on Her Courageous Characters
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In this CBS Sunday Morning interview, renowned Chilean author Isabel Allende discusses her family history, the inspiration behind her courageous and passionate characters, and her latest novel, The Wind Knows My Name (Ballantine Books, 2023), translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle.
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Survival Drama
In the television series Yellowjackets, members of a high school girls’ soccer team survive a plane crash in the remote Canadian wilderness and descend into savage clans to stay alive. The dark coming-of-age drama, which incorporates everything from romantic entanglements to cannibalism, brings to mind fictionalized and real-life survival stories such as William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies and the 1972 Andes flight disaster. This week write a short story in which a group of people is forced to survive in a strange and wild place. What dramas arise when the limits of human endurance are tested?
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