February 2002 Cover Image

An Interview with Beverly Lowry

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Stephanie Gordon
Born in Memphis and reared in Mississippi, Beverly Lowry received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Memphis State University in 1960. She has taught at the University of Houston, the University of Montana, the University of Alabama, Rice University, and George Mason University, where she currently heads the nonfiction track of Mason's writing program. Lowry is the author of dozens of short stories, book reviews, and essays, as well as six novels and one nonfiction book.
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An Interview with Mark Halliday

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Matthew Cooperman
The question of the person, of the relative presence or absence of the person in a given poem, defines the ambitions of the art to create a social contract. The contract may exist with oneself, or more likely with a multitude of others, but it inevitably turns upon the psychological need to be seen. Or seen and heard.
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The Literary Clock: Strategies for Handling Time in Fiction

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Amy Weintraub
Without consciously choosing to do so, I seem to begin my stories in the middle of things. Many writers do. It's a way of engaging the reader in present action, in the something that is happening now, on the page. But there are problems inherent in this approach. The primary one, of course, is the judicious weaving in of the circumstances leading up to the moment where the action of the story begins.
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The Muse in the News

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Andrew Ciofalo
The title for this essay is an apt borrowing from a headline under which on August 1, 1993 Washington Post political reporter David Von Drehle lamented the loss of the poet in him. Though some dispassionate copy desk denizen contrived the headline's internal rhyme, it did not stray far from the spirit of the author's disaffection.

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Of the Living Dead: The Poet-Critic in an Age of Theory

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Sandra Gilbert
Two famous theoretical passages will, I hope, establish a context for the "text"—a.k.a. the "story"—that I want to consider here. I draw the first, a meditation of sorts on death (or perhaps, more accurately, murder), from one of the most celebrated works of the late French thinker Roland Barthes. "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing," wrote Barthes in his mightily influential "The Death of the Author."
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Gertrude Stein's Grandaughters: A Reading of Surprise

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Natasha Sajé
It's said that Elizabeth Bishop's pet toucan was named SAM, as an acronym for the three qualities in poems she prized most: spontaneity, accuracy, and mystery. Of course, what readers perceive as spontaneity may be the product of deliberate and intense labor on the part of the writer; ultimately it does not matter how conscious the poet was at the moment of writing.
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