Amy Glynn: Ketamine Redwoods

At first I wanted to write only at night. The great romantic writers I admired wrote mostly in the witching hours. Can you imagine Kafka lugging his laptop to Starbucks at seven in the morning?

There’s something to value about a completely unmediated and uncurated encounter with old books: a chance to access for yourself the raw material of history...

If Christopher Pike’s YA novels were sold out at my local Crown Books, I was faced with the choice of either Sweet Valley High or The Baby-Sitters Club...

On any given day, walking around the yard, one was almost certain to hear one prisoner ask another, “Hey, man, got any gurps?” I knew it had something to do with drugs...

If there is ever to be a next generation, we need one another, flawed as we are...

Have they clocked our nocturnal ways that bite at kleptomaniac clockhands in our capitals?

Who or what is Peter Pan? Peter stands for a deep psychological desire in all of us to return to childhood and escape into an earlier, freer state of being...

The Doom of the Great City imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event’s lone survivor sixty years later...

Don’t we go to literature to find the logic that might displace the absurdity of our lives?

The first person to be photographed was a man having his boots cleaned. There were others in the same street, but they moved and became invisible...

This essay considers some reasons for lyric’s return in black British poetics by first taking a broad look at the field, and then by attending to the work of several poets writing since the 1990s but publishing most visibly since the millennium...

This new world of ours, structured by the internet, is unrelentingly violent, as it is inimical to human freedom and human thriving...

Tonight I walked under the stars through the snow & stopped & looked at my far sparklers & heard the voice of the wind so slight & pure & deep as if it were the sound of the stars themselves revolving...

Esbjerg is a seaport town in Denmark. In the story, it’s presented as an obscure place...

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness...

Well I grew up in the New Zealand of country pubs and sheep and macrocarpas; and beyond it, we were told, was a planet structured around the British Empire turning into the Commonwealth turning into... something else...

Through all those years of journal entries, Lucy Maud Montgomery was always intelligent, often funny and never boring. I wanted to know what she’d say next...

Carolyn Kizer, feminist poet and founding editor of Poetry Northwest, became the first Program Director for Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966...

If rebirth does actually happen, I will be reborn as an amoeba or a snail...