“Are we ever entirely satisfied with our creative output? I’ve tried the thousand-words-a-day writing regimen, but the same process doesn’t necessarily fit every book. The one element that remains consistent for me is the need to construct a living breathing world and living breathing individuals within it before I start…(Read More)
“Following the successive deaths of all four of their children, aged from 12 days to 11 years old, between 1880 and 1890, financier Spencer and writer Katrina Trask in 1900 bequeathed the near entirety of their considerable fortune toward establishing an artists’ retreat on their rambling estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. “Since God in…(Read More)
After spending a month at Yaddo in 2019, I was delighted to share a few words on the famed artist retreat’s inspirational history and brave future with one of my favorite publications, AD (Architectural Digest). To read the piece in entirety (and see pics!), look here…(Read More)
From fragments of the poem Geryoneis by the 6th-century BC lyric poet Stesichorus, relating to the 10th labor of Hercules, classicist Anne Carson spins a novel in verse about a sensitive, bullied, and abused boy who with maturation finds love in photography and a young man named Heracles. Told with humor, pathos, and beauty…(Read More)
In this slim volume, 176 pages in total, Jeanette Winterson uses the brashness of current language to re-make the encounter between Atlas and Hercules into a contemporary consideration of choice and freedom. But there’s more: autobiographical material and the Soviet space dog Laikka also insert themselves into the story. Not everyone is going…(Read More)
Dame Agatha Christie may have become restless after perfectly mastering the British mystery novel. For her 65th-or-so work, she challenged her famous fictional detective Hercules Poirot to choosing cases that conformed to the Twelve Labours of Hercules. Well, of course, she did—he’s HERCULES Poirot. Some of the cases correspond more closely…(Read More)
Yaddo!
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What do James Baldwin, Aaron Copeland, Delmore Schwartz, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Roth, Sylvia Plath, Milton Avery, Ned Rorem, Carson McCullers… have in common? They’ve all spent long, quiet hours working at Yaddo. And soon I will too! I’m honored to have received an invitation to be in residence at this storied artist community…(Read More)
Book Groups
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I’ve joined the Novel Network, a innovative new venture that connects book groups with authors. On Novel Network, everything is nicely curated with a handy, regularly updated calendar, and book groups can use its services for free. If you’d like to know more about it, take a look here…(Read More)
“Tales from Here and There: On Ugandan Literary Culture,” which appeared in the Millions, was one of my all-time favorite essays to research and write: “All of this pioneering activity in Kampala might seem to have laid fertile ground for the emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of a powerful Ugandan writerly tradition. Certainly…(Read More)
“In March, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi became a 2018 recipient of the $165,000 Windham Campbell Prize, one of the world’s most generous writing awards. Five years ago, when the Ugandan-born author completed her doctoral thesis, the novel Kintu, at the University of Lancaster in the U.K., she was unable to find a…(Read More)
