February 2008 
Taking Tips From Hemingway
David Kalish
Hemingway is renowned for creating unsolved mysteries in the text that add to a sense that the narrator, or storyteller, knows more than the reader. He essentially took out much of the background information, leaving us with a set of hints, allusions, and unfinished ideas.
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Aural Invention as Floral Splendor: Louis Zukofsky's Vision of Natural Beauty in 80 Flowers
Leon Lewis
The central issue of the poems in 80 Flowers is whether, within the dense thicket of his language, the beauty of a flower and the instinctive emotional response that it engenders still bloom in Zukofsky's depictions?
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NEA Report Shows that Steep Decline in American Reading Skills Will Have Significant Long-Term Negative Effects on Society
Matt Burriesci
The NEA's new report, To Read or Not to Read, finds that Americans are reading less, and that their reading comprehension skills are eroding. Moreover, these declines will have serious civic, social, cultural, and economic implications. A complete copy of the 99-page report is available at the NEA's website, www.arts.gov.
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The Rich Get Richer-& Better Educated, Too
D.W. Fenza
The social mobility that afforded literary accomplishment from so many classes and ethnicities of peoples gave North America a smarter, more diverse, and more humane literature. America's engineering of free or affordable education has been a crucial element of that success, just as easy access to education advanced our prosperity and ingenuity. Unfortunately, this great asset and enabler of the American Dream is in peril.
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Creative Alliance: An Interview with Jonis Agee & Brent Spencer
Cindy M. Yeats Olson
Good stories are about trouble and its consequences. That trouble can be internal, interpersonal, physical, whatever. An effective troublemaker is essential in creating an effective story, someone who lacks emotional or ethical restraint. The protagonist needs to be flawed as well, and needs to be placed in a situation of change.
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Charming Banter: An Interview with Elizabeth Spires & Madison Smartt Bell
William Walsh
There is a real advantage to writing an extended prose piece in that you don't have to keep starting over.
Every poem, unfortunately, is a completely new beginning. It would be really fabulous to have a poetic project that lasted for months or years.
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Controlling the Distance Between Reader & Character: The Primary Process
Kenneth Kaye
The primary process doesn't have a headquarters, as far as we know, but I picture it frequenting those basement service areas as well as the right side of the upper brain, floating in and out of consciousness, free of the constraints of logical reasoning. It's the good stuff, in other words.
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What Happens When the Lights Go Out?
Peter Grandbois
The question is not simply how Juan Preciado fits into this world, but also how does the reader. How does a point of view multiplied many times over reflect the ineffable experience of being human?
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One-Line Poems
Michael McFee
A one-line poem is not a longer poem condensed, a larger block of text whittled down to a single thin horizontal. It's not made in the manner Pound claims he wrote "In a Station of the Metro," reducing it-over the course of eighteen months-from thirty-nine lines to eighteen to two. It doesn't work that way.
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Reconsidering Omniscience in Contemporary Writing
Jenny Dunning
But narration that moves between an overt narrator and character consciousness or even one that employs a degree of omniscience can also be a powerful strategy-and this strategy is one that we don't talk about enough.
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