That is, a sentence about a sentence I love, up now at the brilliant Big Other.
May 17, 2010, 10:52 a.m.Category: Nonfiction
A full glass lifted to Ron Mitchell and the rest of the staff at Southern Indiana Review for fitting two chunks of flash memoir into their Spring 2010 issue. “Houhai Lake in Winter” and “The Overnight Train from Xian Pulls Into Beijing” have superb company - Liam Rector and James Valvis, Randall Brown and Joe Meno, Laura Madeline Wiseman and Adam Johnson, bright lights all.
April 28, 2010, 7:35 p.m.Categories: Auto-trumpeting, China, Litmags, Nonfiction, Travel
It is of course a pleasure to be very nearly anywhere: that is, to be. But to be in an anthology compiled by Lee K. Abbott and featuring, among many others, Michael Martone, Stephen Dixon and Terese Svoboda: that is a splendid thing. "Krazy" was first published in the likewise awesome Hot Metal Bridge back in 2007; Best of the Web is one of Dzanc's yearly endeavors, captained through 2009 by Nathan Leslie, by Matt Bell from here on out, and I thank all involved.
July 8, 2009, 10:44 a.m.Categories: Auto-trumpeting, Nonfiction, Travel
will be in Chicago for the upcoming AWP conference, by all means track me down.
January 30, 2009, 11:03 a.m.Categories: Interviews, Litmags, Nonfiction, Short Stories, Travel
Etiqueta Negra, (for whom, full disclosure, I now serve as asesor de contenido,) caught wind of the cloak-and-daggerings involved in writing for Chinese magazines, and asked for my take. The results: like this.
September 30, 2008, 9:30 a.m.Categories: China, Nonfiction
I've just gotten back from an extraordinary three weeks in St. Petersburg, where I was on the faculty for the Summer Literary Seminars. I taught a travel writing workshop, gave a reading with the poet Mark Halperin in the gorgeous Nabokov Museum, gave a lecture and a craft talk. And outside the classroom, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the beauty of the city, the intensity of the white nights, the richness of literary culture and cultural history...
Part of it, of course, were the people with whom I shared the experience. Aside from Mark, Tony Swofford was there, Paisley Rekdal and Meg Storey, Daniel Baird and Elizabeth Hodges... And that's just the foreigners. We also got to hang with some of the writers building contemporary Russian literature--Alexandr Skidan, Ekaterina Taratuta, Dmitry Golynko. Just superb.
Like everyone else who's ever been part of the program, I went with James Boobar on his justly famous Dostoevsky walk. Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker and Tom Burke have put together a great local staff, and a great program of extracurricular trips. And the city itself...
Forgive this raving, but I just can't recommend the place/time/seminar strongly enough. Many thanks to Dan and Steve at Dzanc for arranging my time there. St. Petersburg will be showing up in my writing for years, I suspect. And I'd write a great deal more about it right here and now, except that it's time for me to leave Beijing, fly to Peru, move to Syracuse, build a year's worth of life there... But if you're interested, go check out the program's webpage, or this promo video that Ken Calhoun put together.
And then go, go, go.
July 6, 2008, 10:02 a.m.Categories: Art, History, Nonfiction, Translation, Travel
And the family trip we took to Xian, which I've mined once or twice before, comes through for me once again: a hard moment going bright, now up as part of Issue Two of the fine new Hot Metal Bridge, along with great fiction by Dan Chaon and Dan Marshall, nonfiction by Michelle Wildgen and Shya Scanlon, and interviews with Tom Perrotta and Stewart O’Nan.
October 30, 2007, 7:20 p.m.Categories: China, Food, Nonfiction, Travel
Steven Millhauser has been one of my favorite authors for years, and when Ron Hogan called I'd just finished The Knife Thrower and Other Stories in the course of a trip to Nanjing, so pretending that it would be in any sense possible to pick an all-time favorite story was easier than it otherwise might have been. Up, now, at Beatrice.
October 24, 2007, 7:13 p.m.Categories: Fiction Collections, Nonfiction
As mentioned before elsewhere, I have determined to make all future contributions to The Nervous Breakdown in the form of Untimely Book Reviews. Why, exactly, this obsession with Untimely? I am not at all sure, but for the moment it feels right.
July 24, 2007, 3:12 p.m.Category: Nonfiction
Julie Sisk, the editor of Map Magazine out of Nanjing, takes her best shot at me in the latest issue. Most of the interview deals with the new cultural/historical guide to the city that I just wrote, but the questions branch out from there.
June 28, 2007, 8:21 p.m.Categories: China, History, Interviews, Nonfiction, Travel
