I’ve been immersed in childhood recently. The unfettering of it, the recollection of it and, most of all, understanding it; I’m a parent of this milieu, I have to understand all things. Straddling these three points, however, has me in a bit of a knot. Picture the children’s game, twister, and you . . .
Read MoreI’m over at the Huffington Post today with some tips on how to navigate/survive the behemoth of all conferences, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. The full article, ‘First Time at AWP? 11 Ways to Tame the Beast,’ can be found here. A sample below: (1) Re-write your own schedule. The . . .
Read MoreLast year, around this time, I was getting ready to fly home to Sri Lanka to attend the Galle Literary Festival, an event I reflected on afterward in a post titled ‘The Dutch, The British and the Galle Literary Festival,’ a post meant to consider its many pluses as well as suggest . . .
Read MoreA few years ago, when I was working at an elite liberal arts college, I held a freelance job as a writer for the college magazine. Part of my duties included covering speakers who came to campus, one of whom was Cornel West. The piece I wrote, ‘Single Man March,’ was drawn . . .
Read MoreIn a world defined by a 24 hour news cycle, Julian Assange is getting a few extra days. Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a site dedicated to humiliating large governments, primarily the American government, who saw fit to herald the vast amounts of sewerage he wished to dump on the globe with . . .
Read MoreI’m over at the Huffington Post Books site today, talking about the matter of which of us can claim the right to write. You can read the whole piece, titled ‘Word After Word After Word,’ over there. Here’s an excerpt: Somehow, people always seem to assume that a non-lucrative profession such as . . .
Read MoreSo I watched the movie, Waiting for Superman, on opening night here at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. And, yes, I’ve linked the film to the website that allows people to take action rather than the one that allows people to find showtimes because action is necessary and showtimes are easy to . . .
Read MoreI am over at Huffington Post Books blogging about the new $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. You can read the full post at this link, but here’s an excerpt: I heard about being included on the long list for this prize via a google alert that also had one alerting . . .
Read MoreI was listening to NPR’s morning edition in my car a couple of days ago when a segment on Iraq and Afghanistan came on. It began this way: The U.S. has officially ended its combat mission in Iraq, while tens of thousands of extra U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan are moving into . . .
Read MoreI’ve just recently returned from visiting The Enlightened Land, i.e. Canada, specifically, Quebec City, and perhaps that has colored my American view; a view long-accustomed to isolating a few injustices to rant about rather than looking at the vast canvas of injustice against which we fling our careless paint. In Canada, unlike . . .
Read MoreI became a citizen of the United States on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Sitting in a room at the University of Maine, I listened to a speech made by a senior administrator at the university that spoke not of the benefits of citizenship but of its responsibilities: to participate . . .
Read MoreI’m over at The Rumpus today in a “mini” conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, Lorraine Adams. You can read the full text – it is short, by definition – here. Even more brief excerpt below: Adams: No one ever asked me this. But you’ve hit on why I don’t write . . .
Read MoreI’m over at the Huffington Post today, blogging about the recent spate of “20 under 40” lists which include The New Yorker, the UK Telegraph and Dzanc Books. You can read the full post here. For now, an excerpt: Is it really true that the trend is changing for female American novelists? . . .
Read MorePoor. Poverty. Impoverishment. I’ve heard these words bandied about a lot recently. That last one in particular is a funny word. It sounds as though the state of being poor is a fact, that “impoverishment” is endemic to the place that is suffering from the condition. And yet, what impoverish actually means . . .
Read MoreEarlier this year I gave a couple of speeches, one at the State Department and another to an assorted collection of expatriates and Sri Lankans courtesy of the American embassy in Sri Lanka. The speech was on immigration, emigration and writing. Part of what I spoke about involved a sort of meditation . . .
Read MoreToday my best friend celebrates his birthday in a state, New York, which denies him and many of his friends basic rights and benefits that the rest of us take for granted. As I think about that, I am reminded of a Fall morning many years ago, when I sat in a . . .
Read MoreI am over at the Main Line Times today, but if you want to avoid the usual suspects, all anonymous, unloading over there, just read the op ed below in its extended version. Respice finem means, literally, “look to the end; consider the outcome.” I was reminded of those words as I . . .
Read MoreI am one of those writers of prose (fiction and non-fiction), who is actually a lover of poets and poetry. At the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Denver, Colorado last week, I found myself purchasing collections of poetry, among them Satellite Convulsions, Poems from Tin House (Tin House . . .
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