I recently finished Life Is Everywhere, a novel by Lucy Ives. Though to call it a novel is a bit of a stretch: it’s really more of a frame story with some stories-within-stories stuffed in the middle, the conceit being that these are the texts the protagonist just happens to have in her bag when she winds up unexpectedly spending … Read More
Is Fiction Escapist?
Recently, I’ve been reading The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, by Jonathan Gottschall—an excellent companion to the work of Lisa Cron, on the evolutionary role of storytelling and its centrality to human consciousness and culture. In the course of Gottschall’s argument that fictional stories are in fact essential to our learning and development as a species, he first dismisses the … Read More
What’s your cup of tea?
If you’ve been writing for a while, you’ve probably gotten to the point where you treat your writing like work, whether or not anyone is actually paying you for it–and that in many ways is the mark of a professional. But creative writing really is NOT like other forms of work, and at this time of year–which in so many … Read More
Black Friday Book Magic
When I was younger, we used to celebrate the day after Thanksgiving as “Buy Nothing Day”–a protest against the mindless consumerism of the Christmas season. These days, I do my best to practice conscious consumerism, purchasing secondhand whenever possible, and from ethical companies when it’s not–and though I don’t believe conscious consumerism will save the world (if only it were … Read More
