I previously wrote a few words on the importance to the writer of the suspension of disbelief. I would like to say a little more because I did not say all that I feel on that topic. Samuel Taylor Coleridge…
Second Person: Write down, not up by Adam Dove
Second person is like the lonely middle child of writing perspectives. Everybody knows first person, because it’s always talking about itself. It just feels kind of natural, like it’s always been there. And third person – everybody wants to be…
Discontinuity in Fiction by David Massey
Morse Peckham, a professor under whom I took a class in graduate school, had a theory that the role of the arts in a complex, stressful society is to provide discontinuity, so that people might rehearse the experience of it…
Book Review by Lauren Sartor: “Life on Mars” by Tracy K. Smith
The poetry in Tracy K Smith’s book, Life on Mars, examines the limitedness of the human species. The poetry speculates on the smallness of humankind, the incapacity of human intellectuality, and the irrationality of human emotions. The language is accessible…
More on the Senses by David Massey
I want to say a few more words about the senses in literature. So much can be accomplished through visceral detail. Consider the first paragraph of Anton Chekhov’s “The Beauties”: I remember, when I was a high-school boy in the…
On Method by David Massey
I read a statement by an author recently that if one does not follow a regular regimen of daily composition, one is not a serious writer. This was a fairly vain statement, it seemed to me, because it relegates the…