There’s no way Matthew Weiner and the other producers of Mad Men could have planned it. Two weeks after our country endures the Boston Marathon Bombing and the ensuing manhunt, AMC airs “The Flood,” an episode in which the mid-century modern clad characters in the show grapple with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The …
Tag Archives: Author
Word Portland: Come for a Pint, Stay for the Words
Literary readings can be sad affairs. At their worst, they’re either quiet and bleached, the audience members every so often making an “Mmmm” sound at appropriate times when an image or phrase brings a slight tremor to their soul. Or, they too often exist at the other end of the literary reading spectrum where audience …
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Steve Almond and the Art of Reading Literary Smut in Public
Here’s how you get away with reading sex scenes in public: make the experience really human. That’s what I learned from attending Steve Almond’s reading at Space Gallery in Portland last Saturday (1.26.13). Being raised in the Catholic tradition, where sex is often had but seldom talked about, I still squirm when hearing someone openly …
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Every Writer Needs a Good Bass Kicking
If you’ve read my Stonecoast MFA graduation speech, you noticed that I took a couple of jabs at the writer and teacher, Rick Bass. If you were in attendance at the graduation ceremony, then maybe you were lucky enough to see Rick flash me the bird as he sat with other faculty members a few …
What the Concept Album Can Teach Short Story Writers
In the summer of 2007 on a campus in the Bread Loaf Wilderness in Ripton, Vermont, I inadvertently incited an argument between two writers. While discussing Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker in a fiction writing workshop run by the patient and at times clairvoyant Patricia Powell she noted that Danticat’s book was a novel that …
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DAVE PATTERSON 