L.A. waiters and cops and clerks still have screenplays in their back pockets and auditions at 9am which make them call in sick at their day jobs.
Forget it Jake, It’s Hollywood – Editor’s Pick
Essay on the Ideal (Poetry) Reader – Editor’s Pick
If you think poetry is in the service of something I feel sorry for you.
Flock Apart – Editor’s Pick
The boiler was an oven, three stories high, tiled inside with innumerable iron plates. It incinerated bark and limbs and waste wood to power the generators that ran the paper mill, burning twenty-four-seven, except when, like that afternoon twenty years ago, it needed to be overhauled. That’s when they fed people like Mo and me into the boiler.
Connor de Bruler’s Where I Write From – Editor’s Choice
I love the beginning of James Agee’s A Death in the Family. It was right around the time I had heard (from where I can’t remember) that good writing uses almost no adverbs or adjectives, and here this guy was describing his corner of Knoxville as “fairly solidly lower middle class.”
The Friend/Enemy Distinction – Editor’s Pick
So Jeremiah quit, uncertain of his prospects, and unable to say what the future held in store. All he knew was that he could no longer continue as a student. If Walter Benjamin couldn’t make it as an academic, he decided, university life was not for him either. He returned to his library books and found a job as a barista in the café across the street from his apartment in downtown Oakland.
Atlanta Evening – Editor’s Pick
These days, he waited before he interrupted. And he interrupted only when he was about to burst: No way his daughter was enlisting. Nor was she going to Afghanistan, or Syria, or wherever, he added, wiping his fingers on his pants. Given his Vietnam frolic, what was she thinking?