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  In an age of smart phones and cloud storage, few things seem more primitive than a manila folder with a slice of white paper in it, but that’s what I use to keep track of the essays I submit to literary magazines. My system is simple: one folder for each essay I’m submitting, and [...]

Featuring Jazz Cars, Prague boxers, and James Bond.

“Fuck I was not ready for this…”

Twenty four years’ difference is the same as a day’s.

Plath, like no other poet, has been idolized and appropriated and taken ownership of, cast and recast by acolytes as a “suicide doll,” as her daughter, Frieda Hughes, once said. For the many years I’ve spent studying Plath, I’ve worried that I might be behaving this way, too, that even my disdain for what I see as the wrong kind of Plath groupies is proprietary in a way I have no right to be.

In Portland, we were planning to cash in on our privilege.

From a young age, I wanted to create the sort of imagery that I saw in commercial catalogs and magazines. Wordplay as foreplay, mutual obsessions with refuse from a bygone moment. It was from old postcards, vats of glass eyeballs, and stuffed tigers that my sensibility was born.

Granted, Fifth Street, home to this lumpy little house and big open lot, was not really part of the neighborhood, but over the past few weeks it had become quite clear that this block would be the closest to Carroll Gardens my bank account would allow.

Through his journalistic writing, Whitman tapped into the primary concern that would later become the backbone for his poetry: the idea that personal growth emerges from profound empathy and that this self-transformation can be achieved through art.

Adam Braver’s newest novel, Misfit, hit shelves this month. The novel centers on the last weekend of Marilyn Monroe’s life, which she spent at Frank Sinatra’s resort, the Cal Neva Lodge, in Lake Tahoe –a resort that played a part in Braver’s childhood. Growing up in Northern California in the 1970s, I regularly went to [...]

“As he presses sponge across marble, does the worker think of his girlfriend and want to claw himself open until he is with her, undoing his decision to leave? Is necessity enough to console him?”

“And remember, honey,” she yells as the door is closing. “It is always better to regret the things we have done than the things we haven’t!”