“I wrote lists of possibilities, adding, subtracting, and relocating masterpieces like a mad clerk in a subterranean reading room… Lists. Small anchors in the swirl of transmitted waves, reverie, and saxophone solos. A laundry list of lists actually retrieved in the laundry.” — Patti Smith, M Train 2015 I don’t…

“Everything the eye sees enters a circle, / The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils / And any love to be open becomes an O.” — How to Draw a Perfect Circle, Terrance Hayes, 2015 Hiiiii It’s 5:30 and the baby monitor is talking to…

“My mouth blooms like a cut.” I kept a copy of Anne Sexton’s “The Kiss” by my bed during all my college years in Bellingham, WA. At 20, I thought — I want to step into the fire. I want a resurrection. Now, I am almost 27. I’m a single…

“I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something.” — Before Sunrise, 1995 I like being in between. …

Deep Sea Diver’s newest album featuring Jessica Dobson, Peter Mansen, Garrett Gue and Elliot Jackson resonates. — Like many listeners of Deep Sea Diver, Jessica Dobson’s lyrics have continually confronted me in ambiguous and powerful ways. Often the contrast of the music and the lyrics provide competing messages for listeners that open each Deep Sea Diver song up to alternate interpretations ideal for repeated listening. Double entendres…

Ernest Hemingway, the great American author who fathered fiction fraught with stories of loss, love, and war, committed suicide on July 2nd, 1961. After his death Hemingway left behind a significant amount of unpublished fiction. Among this fiction to be sorted through, edited, and later published, was the manuscript for…

Ernest Hemingway’s most recently published posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden, is a text fraught with controversy and undeniable depth. His heroine in this novel, Catherine Bourne, is a woman haunted by her femininity, furious with society and defiant in her lifestyle. As the etymology of Catherine’s name, Bourne, may…

The Reader’s Place in Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was published, with great debate and scandal surrounding it, in 1899. Becoming an indispensible literary work for feminism and a representative piece for American fin de siècle culture. Chopin’s novella The Awakening concerns itself with the epitome of the existential crisis for a woman torn between…

Songs can be as poetic and enrapturing as any classically great prose. When I read I always think about other writings or verse that I have been exposed to with thematic similarities. While working on two different papers recently I found myself thinking about a multitude of themes tied to…