Author Archives: Andrew Roe

Quote from poet Louise Glück: The fundamental experience of the writer “is helplessness… Most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write, wanting to write differently, not being able to … Continue reading →

Marisa Silver on the short story: “The short story, to me, carries the essence of what is magical about writing: that a full human being can be conjured in a sentence, that an emotional state can be suggested with two … Continue reading →

“My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old.” That’s from Donald Ray Pollock’s “Real Life,” the opening story from his collection Knockemstiff. I’ve been thinking about … Continue reading →

That’s the question asked by Gregory Cowles in, appropriately, a Paper Cuts blog post. The occasion is the publication of Jose Saramago’s The Notebook, a compilation of blog posts that the Nobel Prize winner wrote from September 2008 to August … Continue reading →

Mark Sarvas @ The Elegant Variation recently posted this poem by Edward Hirsch. I’d never read it before. Definitely will resonate for anyone who’s watched a parent go down this path… Lay Back the DarknessBy Edward Hirsch My father in … Continue reading →