Well, it’s April — the cruellest month and all that — and rather than breeding lilacs out of the dead land (whatever that might involve), or mixing memory and desire, or doing any of the other things that literary types should be getting up to in April, I’m going to be spending the next few…

I gave my design students at MICA the assignment “Observe and React.” They had to observe the actions of three strangers on three occasions. They had to describe the events and then react to the events in separate paragraphs numbered one through six. Jinhwan Kim is a Korean design student who speaks English as a…

In the spring of 2011, I taught the senior thesis class at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Mel Werschky, a senior illustration major from Italy (English is his second language), chose to illustrate 1984, the novel by George Orwell. I commented on Mel’s rough draft of his thesis essay, and then we exchanged…

As designers, we fill our rooms with objects that meet our design standards, formally or functionally, but we typically ignore the design of the first thing we see when we wake up: our alarm clock. Before the age of LCDs and LEDs, nixie tubes were the preferred way of electronically displaying numbers. Made of a…

I love PaperMate Sharpwriter #2 pencils. I have always been a doodler. From the time I could write, I have always sketched something. Little arrows and asterisks surround my to-do lists. Somehow I think that doodling around the thing that I’m actually supposed to be doing will help it get done. For most of my…

I pick up a stick and scratch my name in the dirt. I flick open a knife and carve my name into the picnic table. I piss my name in the snow. I toe my name in the sand. I am here and I made this. See? Look at it. This proves it. I was…

“I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” — Jane Austen on Emma + “Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade — demons placed there merely to…

“The story, in the first draft, has put on rough but adequate clothes, it is ‘finished’ and might be thought to need no more than a lot of technical adjustments… It’s then, in fact, that the story is in the greatest danger of losing its life, of appearing so hopelessly misbegotten that my only relief…

“The artist secretes nostalgia round life, as worms plaster their tunnels, as caterpillars spin their cocoons or as sea-swallows masticate their nests.” —Cyril Connolly + “If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any…

It is February 5th and I have come to the residency late because (apologies) I have been promoting a novel—an activity that includes explaining my motives, naming my influences, answering questions about family, and trying to look plucky as I stand before a photographer with a parrot on my shoulder. Should I use this residency…

I’m a late starter in terms of writing fiction. I began to learn the art of the short story only in 2005 when I attended some workshops with Claire Keegan in University College, Cork. Claire is a brilliant writer and an inspirational teacher. Meeting her was hugely significant for me. Her second collection of short…

I wrote this story several years ago for an short-short speculative fiction contest. I have always liked the basic concept in this piece. The plan of taking a reader’s implied expectations (that skeletons want to come back to life, which so many horror movies seem to assume) and reversing it (really, all they want is…