About the author
Give and Take: The Paradoxical Function of Art
“I like it when you explain what I’m seeing.” I had sent a video clip to a colleague—of a performance artist interacting with a warehoused sculpture, a giant suspension if you will, of metallic cones, that could both touch and not touch the floor (touch it with their shadows, but never touch it with their tips, as they hung from the ceiling). My colleague had responded to the clip by telling me she particu...
Writing the Number of Meaning
Let us begin with the lima beans. Ten maybe. Does it matter? I ask this question several times in The Novelist. And it is a good one, if I say so myself. Ten lima beans is a nice, round number, not too big, not too small. Their quantity might have significance, or it might not. Middling numbers are like that. I don’t remember if it was ten. It was probably more. How many times did I sit at my grandmothe...
Higgins Writes the Poetry of the Gods
“Caduceus? Oh, that’s the snake thing,” says my older daughter. This is not the answer I am seeking just at the moment, as I’m looking for my copy of Sorina Higgins’s poetry book—the one with the blue sky and Hermes, set against a white cover. My fourteen-year-old goes on, interrupted at intervals by my twelve-year-old. Caduceus is the staff. It’s held by Hermes. He’s the messenger to the go...
How I Am Not Learning French in Eight Weeks or Less
By Sunday, I am undone. Managing a rapidly-growing poetry blog, working five Facebook pages and three Twitter pages, serving an audience of over 22,000 writers, poets, and insurance adjusters is energizing, but when the week ends, it’s over; I deeply experience the metaphor underlying that well-worn phrase: I can’t think straight. The first order of business to deal with my bent frame of mind is, of course,...
Opening Your Life to Purple-Bottled Dreams
Two years ago I sat on a bare window seat at an inn in Pittsburgh. The air was dry, the day light, as sun reflected off deep, deep snow outside. On this morning, my last at the inn, the owners had gone and I was left with the tawny-haired dog who was keen on shedding. My New-York-black attire was in constant jeopardy as I had earlier roamed the old Victorian with my camera, taking shots of antique irons, a spinning w...
Give It a Year
“A stunt book,” the reviewer called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, because Barbara Kingsolver had dedicated a year of her life to organic vegetables, and she had subsequently written about it. I wasn’t sure if the reviewer was trying to put Kingsolver down, but his words raised a good question: why devote a year to a stunt? Wasn’t there something inherently suspect about that? Might it not be a waste of time?...
Stealing Norton: Do You Work at Your Art?
It starts after dinner, when I share a poem called, “One Art.” I began reading poems after dinner when my husband’s job changed, and he started working late, and we felt the loss of him at our table. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” says Elizabeth Bishop’s poem. The statement is so stark. Is she really serious? Can she be that immune as to continue, “so many things seem filled with the int...
