February 2012
26 posts
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview →
Over at The Rumpus this morn, I interview my old teacher Stephanie Vaughn about the re-release of Sweet Talk. Somehow we also get to Amish people, intuition, and digging fiction ditches. If you don’t know Stephanie’s work, it’s time to know it.
[W]hen the papers were discovered after his... →
Love this.
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Empathy and Reading
This morning I read this article about empathy (via Katherine Bell of the Harvard Business Review). Here’s the lede:
A new study from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor shows that Americans’ levels of empathy have dropped significantly in the last three decades.
The article is brief, but there is a (very internetty) whisper of speculation about the simultaneous decline of...
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“Okay,” he said. “It’s just one theory. What’s yours? And don’t say it’s about...”
– from This Bright River, somewhere in the middle
“Don’t you realize…you can’t march in a straight line to victory? You...”
– Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
Jim Ruland
My friend, author Jim Ruland, just won twenty-five large from Reader’s Digest! Jim wrote a 120 word version of his life. That’s $208 a word, Jim. Not too shabby.
Here’s what won. The piece is called “Homeward Bound” and it’s so sweet you could use it as frosting:
When I was in the Navy, I drank like a sailor. When I got out of the Navy, I drank like a...
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Las Casas - An Excerpt from This Bright River →
Here’s an excerpt from my forthcoming novel, which contains a massive conversation between two characters. This is a little part of that conversation. (Which takes place at Nick’s in Madison, incidentally.)
