Thors writes the body as metamorphic and volcanic (the site of secrets threatening to erupt), yet somehow still human.

Each sentence, traveling first through Brum’s body and then across the chasm between the two languages, demands the utmost attention.

Wyoming summons a host of ideas about working-class people in hard times, about people doing bad things for good reasons, about the choices one makes when there are no good choices.

Her second job, beyond teaching them how to write, inevitably becomes reinforcing their power, listening to their stories, and offering help to report the rape or find therapy.

Sheryl St. Germain, who writes about the loss of her son from addiction, and the addiction that runs in her family, quantifies her grief: it’s fifty miles long.

Barrelhouse TV Workshop: Love is Blind Part 3

Barrelhouse TV Workshop: Love is Blind Part 2

Barrelhouse TV Workshop: Love is Blind Part 1

Barrelhouse TV Workshop: Love is Blind Preview

Before this era of isolation, I was in the habit of playing basketball once or twice a week with a group of creative writing friends at Florida State. I am the last pick, not particularly athletic, with basketball skills long stunted by a hesitance to play after my younger brother outgrew me.

The world attempts to work, homeschool their kids, and day-drink responsibly – and yet they still have time for hobbies, it seems.

You can grow up nestled in plastic and still find something beautiful in it. Accola’s work seems to argue that we should try.

The word mews is actually a singular noun, and refers to a row of old stables made or converted into apartments, particularly on a side street in a city full of busier streets.

But White delivers something more powerful: space where we can imagine these characters endlessly wandering and searching.

I’m driving through the Kern Valley near Bakersfield, California. It’s late March, things are blooming and there’s rushing water below the road and walls of rock framing it. I have that rare feeling of “there’s nowhere else in the universe I’d rather be than right here, right now.”

If Wendell’s new memoir endears the reader to a demanding narrator, it also summons the reader’s own demands. This book is written by a horse girl, but it is not only for horse girls or about them.

But I’m tired, and I barely know what day it is, so let’s keep it short: Our reality is bad. Why not spend some time in an absurd, wholesome alternate universe?

In the end, Empty Hearts just isn’t messy enough to compete with our current reality. Which might not be what the author wanted, but still works in its favor during this long, seemingly never-ending, summer of 2020.

For Toarmino, technology is not just a means to communicate with one another. It embeds itself into what we express to each other.

Feder shows the difficult truth of surviving a loss: that life continues to move, though not in a carefully prescribed direction.