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The Undeniable Genius of John Williams: Stoner and the Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel
This celebration, on the 55th anniversary of the publication of John Williams’s novel Stoner, honors the novelist and his masterpiece with a day of sessions at DU (lunch break on your own) followed by an optional dinner and program. John Williams’ son, Jonathan, will attend this event. Register Here SPEAKERS AND THEIR TOPICS William Zaranka, PhD — Observations on Williams as a Teacher and Novelist. Joe Nigg, PhD — My Mentor: Williams’ Lessons on the Life of a Writer. Anne Marie Candido, organizer of the Williams special collection at the University of Arkansas — Williams’ Archives: The Final Legacy.Read More
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Chinese Fire
My good friend Joe Nigg, wrote an extraordinary 2016 book, The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast. It includes a chapter on “Poetic Fire,” which itself includes a poem of mine—rooted in the phoenix image—called “Revenant.” Now, between Joe’s inclusion of “Revenant” and the book’s appearance in print, I revised the poem, making several minor and a few substantial changes. In particular, the arc of the second version became … well, darker … and it was that second, darker version that subsequently appeared in my collection The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015.Read More
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My Year in Books (2016)
As I did at the end of 2015, I’m laying out my past year’s book reading in the spirit of sharing the often haphazard journey of mind and heart that is my chief solitary pleasure. (There are other pleasures, of course, not solitary at all, but they don’t involve this particular addiction.) Again, the books listed below are ordered according to when I read them. I won’t comment on all of these titles because all of them are well worth reading.Read More
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The Firebird Watch Begins This Fall
The University of Chicago Press has scheduled my friend Joe Nigg’s new book, The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Creature, for release this November. He will discuss and sign copies at a book launch hosted by The Tattered Cover Colfax store at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 19. Be sure to add this event to your calendar! Since publication of The Book of Gryphons in 1982, Joe has explored the rich cultural lives of mythical creatures in a variety of styles and formats for readers of all ages.Read More
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A Fond Adieu to Yves Bonnefoy
Yesterday I happened to finish Ben Lerner‘s crafty and subtle monograph, The Hatred of Poetry, and a few hours later, while Lerner’s essay was still effervescing in my brain, discovered that Yves Bonnefoy had died a day before (Friday, July 1), in Paris. The first reports I saw (Radio France and the BBC) were sketchy and perfunctory. A more in-depth obituary appears in Le Monde, though I had to suffer through a Google translation to read it.Read More
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![Interview with Jim Harrison [Video]](https://www.jhwriter.com/wp-content/themes/supreme/images/noimage.jpg)
Interview with Jim Harrison [Video]
Thanks to my good friend and mythographer extraordinaire Joe Nigg for send this my way.Read More
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Interactive Mythology: Joseph Nigg “Unpacks” a Renaissance Map
A couple of weeks back I posted an image of the first ad for my friend Joseph Nigg’s new book, Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map. The map in question, Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina of 1539, is beautiful and intriguing in itself, but is even more so as an interactive experience on Slate.com.Read More
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Joseph Nigg’s Sea Monsters Has Arrived…
Congratulations to my good friend and mythic-monsterologist Joe Nigg on the release of his new book by University of Chicago Press, Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map.Read More
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Friday Notebook 04.01.2011
Just one lone quatrain in the old notebook this crazy-busy week: “Rats can’t vomit.“Thus are the curled lipsof the Wall Street bankersalways impeccably dry. So let me offer up another sample from one of my old notebooks. This particular poem, written with my old friend Joe Nigg in mind, is riddled with mixed metaphors that make it unsuccessfully baroque—but I still like the playful music of it, pretty much…. Lexicomania for Joe Nigg We labor with language, our honed witsflashing like sewing needles in a sweatshop.But it’s no sweat. We like it. It keeps uskeen and intensely busy.Read More
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Adios, Gary Reilly
Gary Reilly, The Novel Man My friend Gary Reilly passed away a few days back. A damn shame on a personal level, of course—he was brilliant, irascible, funny, and what my mother would have called “peculiar” (a word she always applied with affection). We were always glad to see each other, but never had that warm, unconditional type of friendship that Oprah talks about. Gary operated on his own wavelength, a channel you were welcome to tune in to, but he wasn’t about to change his frequency for your convenience. Gary’s death is a damn shame on another level.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. 
