October/November 2008 Cover Image

An Interview with Nancy Kress

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Martin Naparsteck
SF movies tend to blow things up a lot, and that has contributed to the fact that we don't get a lot of respect. I do want to say that I think this is changing. There are (college English) departments now that allow masters and even PhD theses on science fiction as a genre and also on authors like Ursula Le Guin.
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Pulp Faction: Teaching "Genre Fiction" in the Academy

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Nick Mamatas
As a teaching assistant at Minnesota, Copley-Woods allowed genre fiction in the undergraduate workshops she facilitated. "The kids from working-class backgrounds were thrilled that I would let them write fantasy and science fiction; the middle-class kids, by and large-except for some of my hard-core nerdy computer tech students-sniffed at it."
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Snuffing the Flame: The Moral Implications of Stereotypes

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Lisa de Rubilar
If we're careless, half-hearted gods, our characters will be little more than single-cell blobs that slither from here to there across the page. If we're control-freak gods, we'll create automatons whose software guides them neatly through cow pastures or meteor-blasted civilizations to inevitable triumph or destruction.
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Digging One Writer

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Carol Smallwood
You've seen documentaries of archeologists bending in the hot sun to uncover bones and artifacts, and you've seen underwater divers searching for sunken treasure-work that has increased our knowledge of who we are. The only author I have pursued with the dedication of an archeologist is John Galsworthy, an author who has never been mentioned in my English literature or creative writing classes, and if I mention him to others, I receive blank looks.
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Elegy for Desire: Luis Omar Salinas 1937-2008

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Christopher Buckley
On May 25th, contemporary poetry lost one of its true and original poets, and his family, friends, and all the poets associated with the "Fresno School" lost a brilliant and wonderful compadre-a good and great soul.

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A Recognizable Life: An Interview with Dick Allen

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Leslie McGrath
In addition to most often being a little search or quest, it is a poem which is never "confessional" although it may be "personal," and it's also basically set in the iambic meter, and progresses through the change it tries to illuminate via music.
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Remembering Paul Engle

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Mike Chasar
Engle, who could publish in Poetry magazine and hire Lowell to teach at the Writers' Workshop while drumming up ideas for Hallmark at the same time, understood, I think, the importance and potential of a range of poetries engaging with United States culture...
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Machines Made Out of Words: Translating Function & the Translator's Function

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Tony Barnstone
Poems are small machines constructed to organize and process the mind. But it is hard to perceive perception, and harder still to perceive how the mind is processed by the structures of language within works of literature.

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