Charlotte Lit’s Blog

Welcome to Charlotte Lit’s literary arts blog. What you’ll find here: reviews, interviews, craft essays, previews of literary arts events, and anything else that catches our attention.

Reverse Physics

If millions lose their health care, will anyone hear in the forest of the innocents? Gravity will run upward like a cyclone sweeping all before it, the apple will go skyborne from the grass into the golden leaves, thousands will stand outside the orbit of hospitals, clinics, doctors, the chemistry of addiction will grow inward— […]

When You’re the Emcee

Hosting a literary reading? Here’s poet Richard Allen Taylor on the fine points of being the emcee. Emcees worry about making the colossal gaffe. Just ask Steve Harvey, who famously announced the wrong winner in the Miss Universe pageant. A friend of mine, John B, made a less colossal mistake when he served as emcee […]

In the Evening We Shall Be Examined on Love

In the Evening We Shall Be Examined on Love ~ St. John of the Cross That line was enough to propel Thomas Centolella into his moving poem of that title, and has been enough to stay with me as an iconic constant, a touchstone that I come back to like being aware of the intake […]

How to be Kind to Your Reader: Some Thoughts on George Saunders

George Saunders is big on kindness. When I read the convocation speech he gave at Syracuse University, which is now available to us in a book, Congratulations, By The Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, which I highly recommend, it got me wondering: if you write fiction, as Saunders does beautifully, is there such a thing […]