St. Martin’s Summer

As swallows turning backward When half-way o’er the sea, At one word’s trumpet summons They came again to me – The hopes I had forgotten Came back again to me.   I know not which to credit, O lady of my heart! Your eyes that bade me linger, Your words that bade us part – [...]

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Sigma Tau Delta: Beyond Words

The 2011 Sigma Tau Delta International Convention will take place March 23-26 at the Hilton Pittsburgh near Point State Park and Market Square.  The convention theme, Beyond Words, emphasizes the power of the written word to not only inspire but also to nurture, instruct, serve, and give voice to the voiceless by writing for nonprofit [...]

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Poetry Reading – Patty Seyburn

Chapman University’s Department of English is pleased to present the award-winning poet Patty Seyburn as the second guest poet for the 2010 Tabula Poetica Poetry Reading Series.  The event will take place on Tuesday, September 28, beginning with a Poet’s Talk led by Seyburn in Argyros Forum 201 at 2:30 p.m.  After visiting classes, Seyburn will give a poetry [...]

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The Father of Science Fiction

“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.” ~ H. G. Wells, The Time Machine  English author, historian, essayist, teacher, and socialist Herbert George Wells was born on this day in 1866 in Bromley, Kent County.  As a youth, Wells was an avid reader, [...]

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The Gettysburg Review

The Autumn 2010 issue of The Gettysburg Review is now available and features poetry by Billy Collins, Arthur Vogelsang, and Marvin Bell, stories by Tien-Yi Lee and Paul Zimmer, essays by Amy Leach and Eve Becker, and paintings by Barbara Kassel.  The submission period for the quarterly journal has also just opened, and editors are [...]

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Fear No More

The third week of my course on the life and works of Virginia Woolf entailed the reading and analysis of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf’s brilliant and richly complex novel that explores the activities and innermost thoughts of one day in Clarissa Dalloway’s London life and their juxtaposition with the suicide of a war veteran.  While [...]

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Writers Ask

“I see it in my students – this idea that I have spent all these hours, days, even weeks, on these pages, on this story, they must be good.  Well, the truth is that it is quite possible that they aren’t.  It doesn’t matter that you spent all this time on it.  It still might [...]

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Why the Novel Matters

“Let us learn from the novel.  In the novel, the characters can do nothing but live.  If they keep on being good, according to pattern, or bad, according to pattern, or even volatile, according to pattern, they cease to live, and the novel falls dead.  A character in a novel has got to live, or [...]

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An Evening with Dennis Palumbo and Daniel Pyne

The Pen on Fire Writers Salon is pleased to present an evening with mystery writers Dennis Palumbo and Daniel Pyne on Tuesday, September 14, at 7:00 p.m.  This monthly speaker series, hosted by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, features authors, literary agents, and others involved in the field of writing.  The events take place in the atmospheric Scape [...]

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How My Light Is Spent

In observance of Labor Day, there are perhaps no more fitting poems than Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” and Milton’s Sonnet XIX, also known as “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent” and “On His Blindness.”  “I Hear America Singing,” from the collection Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855)   I hear America singing, [...]

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