“Geese cut a wedge out of the sky, drag the gray days behind them like a skein of old wool.”

CrookerToday is Thanksgiving Day — the perfect time to acknowledge with gratitude The Writer’s Almanac,  American Life in Poetry, and the Poetry Foundation. These organizations email poems to thousands of people like me who wish to read new work by new poets every day. I wouldn’t have heard … Read More

“Usual advice for new faculty is sporadic, anecdotal, and unproven — no matter how well intentioned.”

BoiceThis book is based on the author’s research, conducted over a period of 20 years, on the work habits of faculty members. He studied the behavioral patterns of academics as they taught, wrote, and interacted with their colleagues. From this, he developed a set of strategies that aim to “help … Read More

“Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story,”

GottschallResearchers now believe that the average daydream is 14 seconds long, and we have about 2,000 of them each day (11). Scientists used to believe that humans dreamed in a story-like way only during their REM sleep cycles; it’s now thought that story-like dreams occur independent of REM and across … Read More

“. . . autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened up…”

knausgaard4It defies the imagine: Karl Ove Knausgaard, a writer from Norway, has caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal. An article in the WSJ’s magazine named him the “2015 Literary Innovator,” declaring that he was “quite probably in line to receive a Nobel Prize” for his six-part series. … Read More