Entries by
Notebooking
Timothy: As a novice artist, I once spent several months drawing pictures of lizards and turtles for researchers in an animal behavior lab. I loved being around all the gadgets and learning the jargon of science, but the most interesting aspect was watching everyone fill up stacks of green notebooks with scribbled facts, figures, […]
Paper Love
Dear Writer, I’m writing to you from my well-worn sofa (where else?) a year to the day when our Lost Year began. Or do I mean Loss Year? So often these days, words elude me. Outside it’s spring again, which I forget until I stare out the window and find sunny forsythia and daffodils and […]
Flash Fiction
If a novel is a vast, tumultuous summer sky, and a short story a fast, feverish storm, then flash fiction is a cloud-splitting fork of lightning that electrifies the air. Flash stories (aka short-shorts, smoke-longs, or sudden, quick, nano, micro, or hint fiction—Yasunari Kawabata called them “palm-of-the-hand” stories) are tiny, contortionist shapeshifters that slip between […]
Center City Literary Festival Offers Time and Space to Contemplate Artful Language
We’re busy. Monumentally busy. Our technology-fueled world, with its manic glut of information, steals our sleep, seizes us by the scruff. We spend hours trapped in cars and cubicles and comment sections, our eyes lost in screens, our ears tuned to beeps and clicks, our thumbs typing tiny screeds. That is precisely why, though it […]
UNCC’s Literary Festival Finds a Home in the Heart of the City
When I moved to Charlotte in 2015 for my teaching position in UNC Charlotte’s Department of English, I discovered the campus isn’t what you’d call centrally located. Built north of the city on affordable farmland after World War II, the university has become a thriving urban institution, but a sense of remove from the city—physically […]
