Category: Arts

Writing East

Maybe I’m homesick or maybe I’ve just sold out, but I’ve stopped distinguishing between the states that make up the great green Midwest I call home.

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Poetry, or How to Pray Without a God

April is national poetry month, but a lot of people don’t know or care about it. Completely understandable. Many teachers introduce us to poetry as if it were a fine science.

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The Library Full of Bowling Balls

The short story form is a special kind of animal. It is the form that students of fiction are made to learn first, as though crafting a finely-spun tale of less than twenty or so pages is the first step toward tackling the beast that is the novel. But this is mostly nonsense.

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Divorces & Celebrations

Cam Asutra & Sue Trakama Cam Asutra knew from the moment he saw Sue Trakama walking down the aisle in December of 2009 that their marriage was going to end in divorce. Ms. Trakama was wearing a wedding dress that … Read More

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Libraries

In my house there is a library. It used to be called the playroom, back when I was very small and very young and learned what _Don Quixote_ was by watching the _Wishbone_ episode. It was a library then, too, … Read More

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A Snap

A snap. Audible, no, probably not. But tenable, real. Crack. The sound that comes when you break. I know. I broke two days ago. It was afternoon, or evening, I’m not certain. Snapped from everything. I was a leaf, all … Read More

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One Sentence of the Aeneid

The concept for this article – reviewing a book based on one random sentence – is borrowed from an article printed in the literary magazine The Believer. Virgil’s Aeneid “A chill swept over Aeneas; his limbs went weak; he moaned … Read More

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David Mamet Talking To His Son

DM: Son, I’d like you to come over here. JOE: Come over there? DM: Yes, come over here. JOE: But yesterday you said– DM: Why don’t you come– JOE: Yesterday at Disneyland– DM: –come and sit over here. JOE: [looking … Read More

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There’s Good News and Bad News

Dad, that email you sent with your top 25 YouTube vid’s from the summer of ’08 was great.

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Playing Telephone

And the winner for the 2008 Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off is… Bill Lane!”

Bill leaned into his wife for a kiss. His son beamed and Bill acknowledged the little boy’s pride with a hearty shake of his shoulder. Bill rose and to acknowledge the audience’s cheers, he smiled, clutched his enormous belt buckle between his thumbs and his forefingers, and yanked up the front of his pants.

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The Assumption

From “The Assumption,” a short play based on the medieval Lives of the Virgin. The hero is Mario, a college freshman struggling with his sexuality who mistakes an undiagnosed case of appendicitis for a pregnancy. In this scene, he has been confiding in Lupe, the dorm’s janitress, who reveals herself to be the Virgen de Guadalupe; they are speaking Spanish, which sounds like unrhymed English verse.

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Vignettes from the Hinterlands

On the seventieth anniversary of Ataturk’s death I was in the mountains between Van and Diyarbakir with a baby on my lap and her three year old brother stretched out on the seat behind me while their mother tried to sleep, the silk scarf slipping from her hair.

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