Ward Six

Dear Friends: After more than four years, we have decided to shut down Ward Six. Writing this blog, and reading your responses to our po...

I got a question from a grad student yesterday regarding a paper he's writing, and I thought my answer to him would make a good blog pos...

I listen to a lot of nerd podcasts, including this one , which today included an interesting tangent about Pixar.  You know, the animated fi...

I think I've posted about this before, but it's on my mind this week, for several reasons.  Writers have a strange relationship to t...

Lousy of me, I know, to come slouching in after a week of absence with a self-promotion post, but that's what I'm doing.  Soon I wil...

"luminous prose" = too many goddam words "a tour-de-force" = threw it across the room "a triumph" = huge adv...

I just had a hissy fit on facebook but figure this is probably a better place for it.  A friend remarked that today was Lawrence Ferlinghett...

Funny when you encounter the same unexpected thing twice in twelve hours.  Last night I was sitting on the sofa reading an essay about Kurt ...

A quickie for you this morning: my undergraduate workshop was having trouble getting inspired to write poems, and asked me to give them some...

On HTMLgiant the other day, Blake Butler asked, "What are some good books that have happy endings and don’t suck shit?"   Hey, yea...

A student recommended Mary Miller's Big World  to me the other day; we were at a bar and she brandished it like a pack of the best cigar...

Inspired by the abandoned novels post, we seem to have temporarily abandoned our blog.  Sorry, life intervened! Rhian showed me a surprisi...

page one of King's book I guess I'm a few days late on this topic, but I only just now read the Dan Kois piece in the Times abou...

I've been having kind of an amusing exchange with a friend on facebook, a fellow teacher, who presently is grappling with inexperienced ...

I'm down with e-books, I guess, if that's where we're headed.  But  this really depresses me. “The national bookstore chain has...