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Freedom to Read … and to Write
First, Nicole Sullivan, owner of The Bookies bookstore in Denver, explains why she’s thankful for the freedom to read and explains why we need to resist weakening our democracy’s commitment to that foundational ideal: https://sullivanic.substack.com/p/thankful-for-the-freedom-to-read Secondly, novelist and educator Janet Burroway details her travails in updating the fourth edition of her durable textbook, Imaginative Writing, to the new fifth edition. Her article is aptly titled “Slouching Toward Sensitivity,” a nod to both Yeats and Joan Didion.Read More
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Atwood on The Devil
The Devil comes to a writer and says, “I will make you the best writer of your generation. Never mind generation—of the century. No—this millennium! Not only the best, but the most famous, and also the richest; in addition to that, you will be very influential and your glory will endure forever. All you have to do is sell me your grandmother, your mother, your wife, your kids, your dog and your soul.” “Sure,” says the writer. “Absolutely—give me the pen, where do I sign?” Then he hesitates. “Just a minute,” he says.Read More
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Salud to Joe Nigg for His Lifetime Achievement
Check out this tantalizing interview with my friend Joe Nigg on the occasion of his receiving the Colorado Authors’ League Lifetime Achievement Award. Never was such an honor so well deserved. Click here to visit his website, where you’ll discover a whole world of myth and legend that you may have thought consisted of only an island or two. You can also have fun scrolling through the eight pages of his books in numerous languages available on Amazon.Read More
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Isms and the Liberation from True Knowledge
After observing that “someone who longs for particulars and seizes them in his writing is thinking in the best possible way,” Adam Zagajewski, a page or so later in Slight Exaggeration (as beamed into English by Clare Cavanagh), writes: We rarely consider how much we’ve lost by way of the systematization of intellectual life over the last century. In an age of ideology, systems, endless -isms, have taken hold everywhere, even, or rather especially, in universities.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
