On “Unlikeable” Characters
I’m mining LivingSmall for material for a project, and came across this post. Since I was listening to Mark Maron’s podcast interview with Diablo Cody while I drove in from the cabin this morning, the notion of unlike-ability and female characters was on my mind anyhow. I especially loved the part of the podcast [...]
Caribou Island
One of the things that fascinated me when I was in graduate school was the way that landscape functioned in fiction, and in particular, the ways that wildness and wilderness were portrayed. In part this was because I was trying both to discover and to portray what it was about landscape that kept me in [...]
At the Rumpus: The Last Book I Loved
Over at The Rumpus.net, I take on the Last Book I Loved (which is a book I “love” about once every year or two), The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen. Go take a look (and if you’re not reading The Rumpus on a regular basis, you should be). Tweet
CookbookSlut vs. the Economy
My new CookBookSlut column is up over at Bookslut — I take on cooking and urban homesteading as one approach to the continuing implosion of the economy and the unabating high unemployment rate. I mean, if we’re not going to have jobs anymore, we’d better learn to grow our own and cook our own and [...]
Hare with the Amber Eyes
This year, after many years shying away from such things, I subscribed to a lot of literary magazines including the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. Maybe it’s just that they all sent me seductive introductory offers, maybe it’s that I now have a partner who [...]
New Year, New Blog
Although I don’t anticipate the demise of LivingSmall any time soon, for some time now, I’ve been finding that venue confining. While sustainability will continue to be an ongoing concern, it’s only part of a larger discussion I’d like to begin about how we can interrogate the conventional narratives that are driving our political and [...]
