October/November 2009 
"Advice" From
Thomas Mallon
Depressed by springtime whenever it arrives, he recommends solitude, muses on the chance for a new androgyny in the world and talks about a state of mutual regard between lovers that sounds like D. H. Lawrence's "star-equilibrium" without the preliminary fun.
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Transcending Talk: The Role of Discussion & Context in the Creative Writing Classroom
Justin Maxwell
The pedagogy of mainstream workshop classes creates a paradoxical trap that pressures students to create derivative work and hampers their ability to grow as writers once they leave the classroom. This trap is a fundamental miscommunication that can be fixed by re-contextualizing student work to better focus on the writer's agenda for the text.
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Stepping Through the Threshold: Ways to Achieve Authentic Voice in Memoir
Sebastian Matthews
During a recent "state of creative nonfiction" panel, an audience member asked what the panelists thought of the current memoir "fad." An established nonfiction writer and author of a popular writing manual leaned forward to field the question. "Beginning writers shouldn't write memoirs," he stated matter-of-factly. "They have not lived enough."
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An Interview with Sheryl St. Germain
Allison Schuette
In my mind, we don't invent metaphors; they're already there.
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Voicing the Whole: The Poet's Impulse to Ascend & Descend
Amy Pence
Although their poetic inclinations differed-Dickinson usually gazing beyond death (toward the incorporeal), and Whitman rollicking earthward among humanity, (toward the corporeal)-both poets wisely crafted a holistic vision of the world in their work.
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On Inspiration: Thomas Wolfe, Jorge Luis Borges, & Raymond Carver
Douglas Unger
Writing workshop talk and teaching confined to craft and the materiality of language, augmented by the paternalistic mentor-student critique by the teacher-writer-useful and effective in so many tried and proven ways-in the main share both these prevailing aesthetics of the academy and marketplace cultures.
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Too Much of Moi?
Cris Mazza
When she was nineteen and full of white-hot urgency, Cris Mazza impetuously told a professor, "I can't write in anything but first person."
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An Interview with Duff Brenna— Novelist, Teacher, Editor
Thomas E. Kennedy
I really needed to write. It wasn't that I just wanted to be a writer. I needed to be a writer. It's the psyche's need that gets you through twenty years. Also, I had to work to make a living, and so I couldn't indulge my moody broodings over the piles of rejections, but had to get up each day and go to work.
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Unfair Use
Ronald Goldfarb
As the Che photo became the image representing rebellion, anti-imperialism, and the face of Cuba, Garcia's photo and Fairey's treatment of it also played into people's passions; the fulfillment of Martin Luther King's dream for Afro-Americans, the end of Bush imperialism, the turning of a page in America's civil rights movement for blacks and whites, and more.
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An Interview with Lee Gutkind
Sam Morgan
When the topic of creative nonfiction arises, Lee Gutkind's name is often right there with it. His influence helped bring creative nonfiction into the mainstream as a third genre beside poetry and fiction.
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