The Blog

Kate Fagan's WHAT MADE MADDY RUN

Elizabeth Boyle

Running is a “spectacular balancing act,” ESPN journalist Kate Fagan writes in What Made Maddy Run. “A runner is always attempting to control everything—time, energy, form, workouts, food intake, hydration.” At the college level, distance athletes often have a team of experts helping them perform this balancing act. As a Big Ten distance runner, for example, I worked often with athletic trainers, sports medicine doctors, nutritionists, strength and conditioning coaches, equipment managers, academic advisors, and compliance officers. Only after I finished my eligibility, though, did I find out our team had access to a mental health professional. Mental health, most athletes learn, is an essential part of the balancing act, but it is also something rarely talked about.

Robert Long Foreman's AMONG OTHER THINGS

Maggie Anderson

A walking stick, a club, dirty laundry, boxes, a skillet, a sword, a spoon—can such everyday objects tell us secrets or foretell our future? Can they feel pain or act immorally? How much of us can our things hold, and how much of them can we absorb?

“We are attached to the possession of a thing because we think that if we cease to possess it, it will cease to exist,” wrote the French philosopher Simone Weil. Robert Long Foreman might very well be making a version of Weil’s argument in his book of essays, Among Other Things, in which we quickly learn that a possessed thing can, in fact, contain life—or frequently death.

Interview with Carmen Maria Machado

Katlyn Williams

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the acclaimed debut collection Her Body and Other Parties, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her stories have appeared in wide-ranging publications, including The New Yorker, Guernica, Granta, Best American Science Fiction and Horror, and VICE. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, Machado makes real a boundary-breaking assortment of extreme or extra-realist situations, like disappearing women stitched into formal gowns or dead girls and doppelgangers haunting Law & Order: SVU’s Detectives Benson and Stabler. Within these fantastical landscapes, Machado grounds her narrators, and thus her readers, in visceral emotion and human contact.

Interview with Veteran Writers

TIR Staff

Interview with Cole Becher, author of "Charybdis" (43/1)

Interview with Katherine Schifani, author of "Pistol Whip"

Katherine Schifani

In March 2015, TIR intern Erin Marshall interviewed Kate Schifani, whose essay "Pistol Whip" won our 2014 Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans.

EM: Could you discuss why you decided to write about your military experiences?

Philip Kobylarz's A MISCELLANY OF DIVERSE THINGS

Kerry Hillis Goff

Years ago, when I read William Carlos Williams’s collection of poems Spring and All (1923), it was the first time I experienced a poet who tried to teach people how to read his poetry in his poetry. “So much depends” is the center argument of his book-length tutorial:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Pretty much, if any one of these objects in his poem were placed in a different scenario, our picture would change. That is why “so much depends.” With Williams, as with many Modernist writers who desperately wanted to be more direct, the objects inhabit a relativity. But being direct isn’t necessarily easy.

TS Eliot played around with Freud in his personas, like Prufrock measuring his life in coffee spoons.