Genevieve Pfeiffer: You write about violence, and pain. One poem, in particular, “A Good Life” stayed with me so that I had to come back...
Archive for tag: creative writing

Guarding the Self: Some Notes from the Commute
The importance of protecting the inner life against the stresses and assaults of ordinary life seems to be on everyone’s minds lately. Vox Populi published...

The Sword
Vera Black walks the line as she empties her email, but in a death march kind of way. She finds herself rummaging through routine rejection...

Report from the Field: People Were Upset That People Were Upset
“In the past, death was often a source of suffering.” “The poem is universal because it involves a birth and all readers have experienced being...

ROUNDTABLE: POLICING THE OTHER IN THE LITERARY WORLD
This conversation, moderated by Hoa Nguyen, took place on March 29, 2015. Hoa sent out a preliminary list of questions meant to spark the conversation,...

The Count in the Ivory Tower: Gender Parity in MFA Programs
A graduate PhD student and a tenured professor walk into a coffee shop—sounds like the beginning of a hackneyed joke. Instead, it’s the catalyst for...

Report from the Field: Some Day You Will Ache Like I Ache– What Sexualized Language Means to Me
Recently my grandmother writes on Facebook under a picture of my, at the time, fourteen-year-old sister: “sexy.” A few days later I see my now...

Some Questions About Empathy and Reading
First Questions: The Limits of Empathy I taught two creative writing courses as a graduate student. My undergraduates wanted answers and rules, and instead I...

SUBMITATHON! as Applied Feminist Epistemology: Rejecting Models of Scarcity, Believing in Plenty
I. When I was a Stanford sophomore I took a class called Feminist Epistemology—I know, right?—that looked at ways of learning and doing and knowing...

Report from the Field: Quid Pro Quo
What I remember is red wine sloshing in hotel coffee mugs. What I remember is trying to scoot out of reach of his hand, the...