In 1999, my first writing workshop: Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Yes, in the Napa Valley. St. Helena. Mark Doty was there. David Lehman. Jane Hirshfield. Richard Bausch. (I always get him and his brother confused, never remembering which one it is I met. Which is terrible, given that we actually had a conversation at the [...]

London’s largest Middle Eastern market is just outside my door. Constantly in the background is a broadcast of the Koran with someone singing beautifully in Arabic followed by an unnerving posh British accent translating into English. The people here know me because I visit every day. They say hello and often tell me their stories. [...]

We all have a series of last hours that lead up to the final hour, I suppose. The last hour before boarding a plane, returning home again, leaving the island. The last hour before the final exam, that make-it-or-break-it interview, the big game. The last hour of contractions before the final push. The last hour [...]

It’s easy to get lost in the massive amount of material on the web. If yo u’re anything like me, you like to find sites that offer you something to read for quick little snatches of time — five minutes here, ten minutes there. The thing is, it took me a long time to find [...]

If you haven’t visited the Harvard Book Store, take a minute and pop over there. Watch the shutters open and the store come to life. See what books fill their front windows. Click for a close-up; double click to look inside a book. With your mouse, you can zoom in or out. Amble to the [...]

On the morn ing of February 17th, 2011 I opened my laptop to resume work on a young adult novel that had been kicking my butt for weeks. But now there was a new development that I was certain would put new kinks in an already complicated and increasingly intricate story: I was back in [...]

It’s not unfair to say that his mouth was a mess. I often walk past the acupuncturist’s dark office and see him sitting there alone. Dr. Tian is from China and speaks very little English. He has a pronounced overbite and a severe stutter that was often so bad that he drooled onto the piece [...]

That’s how my professor of Postcolonial Studies began each class last fall. I’m not especially sure how we would feel postcolonial—in fact, a lot of people would say that a group of graduate students at an elite university couldn’t come close to feeling what it’s like be a citizen of a postcolonial nation. Yet I think [...]

Have you noticed how many literary magazines there are out there now ? I have about a year’s worth of four or five great lit. magazines stacked up on my desk that I keep meaning to get to. But what about all the mediocre magazines, and all the really crappy magazines? Who’s reading them all? [...]

Where were all the poets and writers in Zanzibar? Where were those wordsmiths hiding? Throughout my first year in Zanzibar, I may have been living inside the poem that is this island, but I’d stopped writing poetry, and I felt like the proverbial fish out of water. I’d defined myself as a poet and writer [...]

The little shop sat in the shadow of the legendary Kodak tower on State Street. A raw part of the city, drained by suburban retreat and battered by countless soul-chilling storms endemic to cities on the Great Lakes. Immigrants came there a half century before from Ireland, Germany and Italy to establish themselves as craftsmen [...]

Rebecca Lehmann’s first book of poetry, Between The Crackups, has won the Salt Cr ash aw Prize, and will be published by Salt Publishing this fall. The book includes “The Factory,” which was first published in Contrary and subsequently was included in the Best New Poets 2010 anthology. Rebecca is also a regular author here, on [...]

I used to be a vegetarian. For ten years, I consumed neither beast, nor fish, nor fowl. I didn’t eat meat for moral reasons; I thought it was wrong to kill animals for food. But, like many idealists, I eventually caved. Six years later, vegetarianism fully eschewed, this Midwestern girl finds herself living in the [...]