It’s Boxing Day* so my fancy has lightly turned to thoughts of violence: Chain Gang All Stars is a barely dystopian story of prisoners turned gladiators. It’s a book about our culture of violence, but even though the brutality is written beautifully (something I personally have a problem with) it doesn’t glorify it. Quite the…
Twenty years ago, I took my first online writing class. In the early weeks, students posted short stories and critiqued them as a getting-to-know-you exercise. My friend Renee was living in Boston but had grown up in Minnesota, and the other students gushed at how her prose shimmered like wheat fields in the summer sun….
My thoughts are crowded with current events – the University of North Carolina’s decision to offer a tenured position to Nikole Hannah-Jones (the primary NYT journalist behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project) after initially demurring; the increasing misuse and weaponization of Critical Race Theory by those who are clinging so tightly to a sanitized version…