Month: February 2018
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The Art of Reading
As much as there is an art to creative writing, I also believe there is an art to reading. Most everyone can read. But most of us read only for information. Our eyes run across the Facebook page, taking in the news feeds and other people’s lives. Then our eyes move on. But, real reading–that is, reading…
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TWB Podcast: What Is Aesthetics? And Why Should a Writer Care?
In class, we talk a lot about aesthetics, or the study of art–both appreciating it and creating it. It’s something the writer (the literary writer) is thinking about all the time, even if she doesn’t know she is. Walk with me into the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, where I once held a classroom with a…
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Gracias, México, for Saving My Salvadoran Soul
Once my Uncle Paco–the pain-in-the-ass Salvadoran revolutionary in exile in Mexico–saw how much books meant to me, he backed off. After I shook the novel Cien años de soledad in his face and swore I’d read it until I understood it, I holed up in his guest bedroom and started on the first paragraph, with a…
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The Uncle Who Kicked My Salvadoran Ass
My great Uncle Paco was a pain in the ass. He had been all his life. In the 1930’s, he had joined with the Communist movement in El Salvador, during the rise of a dictator they called El Brujo, the Warlock. They had planned for an uprising of the poor against the corrupt and bloody…
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The Rules of Racism: You Can Only Speak One Language (and it damn well better be English)
In class, I teach how creative writing can rouse memory, strong emotions, sharp images, and that, if a student keeps writing, she will surprise herself with her words. Something will come out that she hadn’t planned, an insight, the true emotion over whatever it was she wrote down. She might cry. She might bang the…