Shields used to idolize Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” But these days it “feels to me sort of twee. . I need more comedy, more urgency, more white space.”
BENNINGTON Sixteen critically acclaimed, award-winning authors and faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars will host Writers Reading, an evening reading series during the MFA program s summer residency, which is
Duluth writer’s debut essay collection offers chance to ‘play on the page’ Sound Like Trapped Thunder by Jessica Lind Peterson is seven personal essays that consider the natural world with wide-eyed what-ifs. Written By: Christa Lawler | ×
Jessica Lind Peterson, author of Sound Like Trapped Thunder. (Photo by Amy Woodford)
An elderly woman named Doris was mistakenly calling Jessica Lind Peterson and leaving voicemail messages. She wanted Ted, or someone, to clean her apartment, Doris said, or she just wanted to say hi or “Merry Christmas.” She wanted someone to visit her.
All told, there were 20-30 misfired messages from Doris to an unknown Deb, sent during a six- to eight-month period. Lind Peterson, who talked to Doris at least once, saved them all.
Jenny Boully’s essays are gifts of wonder and experimentation, graced with invention and serious play. In not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, Boully enacts a poetic and critical reimagination of J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, reading and writing between the lines, weaving together, as she describes it, “an alternative to the traditional academic essay on literary interpretation.”
The Body, an essay in footnotes, troubles and reroutes our instincts as readers for narrative and normative meaning-making. Boully’s most recent work, the collection
Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life, is a permission-giving work, a provocation for essayists examining their personal relationship with the form.