My very first vagabonding trip – which was one of the single greatest journeys of my life (if nothing else because it was my first) – happened 25 years ago, in 1994. My friend Jeff and I spent nearly eight months traveling around North America by van, and the two of us reminisce about the…
By Michael Mewshaw First presented as the plenary address at the 2004 South Central MLA Conference in New Orleans, October 28, 2004 (an excerpt) I’ve traveled here to New Orleans from London, where I spend part of each year. And most of you have traveled some distance from your homes and universities so that I…
1) On the deepest source of wanderlust I closed my eyes. I felt the weight of unmapped worlds, unborn language. This was what I was chasing: not the exotic, but a broad-beamed understanding of what is what. 2) On the intoxicating joy of long-term travel The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so…
Note: The following interview appears in the paperback edition of Kate Harris’s Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. Rolf Potts: In the book you say that “travel reveals less about the truth of a place and hints more about how complicated the world is.” It struck me that this is also…
The following riff on the cliches of creative writing (and science fiction writing in particular) was featured in the “Readings” section of the July 2004 issue of Harper’s. [Cliches] STRANGELY FAMILIAR From a list of plots and themes of stories submitted “too frequently” to Strange Horizons, an online magazine of “speculative fiction.” The document was compiled…
Ink runs from the corner of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry The librarian does not believe what she sees. Here eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs…
The people of my time are passing away: my wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it’s Ruth we care so much about in intensive care: it was once weddings that came so thick and fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo: now, it’s this…
1) Adults are often ashamed to be novices As adults, we rarely learn fresh skills or dare ourselves to change direction. We urge our children to be bold risk-takers, to show grit and open themselves to new experiences. But us grown-ups? We hide behind the way we’ve always done things. We become so boring! Adults…
1) Never explain something you can dramatize Master storytellers never explain. They do the hard, painfully creative thing — they dramatize. Audiences are rarely interested, and certainly never convinced, when forced to listen to the discussion of ideas. Dialogue, the natural talk of characters pursuing desire, is not a platform for the filmmaker’s philosophy. Explanations…
1) Narrative structure can be found everywhere Narrative structure can be found everywhere: in jokes, lab reports, historical accounts, personal essays, songs and ballads, news coverage, comic books, movies, sitcoms, and ballets such as the Nutcracker that tell a story through dance. Some television commercials are mini-narratives lasting only a few seconds without dialogue or…
Of all the times I’ve been name-checked in the Washington Post, the most counterintuitive occasion came last month, when it appeared in an obituary for Bushwick Bill, the one-eyed, 3’8″ gangsta-rapper most notable for his work with the Geto Boys. Specifically, the obit alluded to my 2016 book The Geto Boys, which was part of…
