The Craft of Middlemarch: Possibilities for Third Person Omniscient How do I start this? So, apparently, Mary Ann Evans lived for over two decades with a married man? Did y’all know this? She lived in the home of a married man as his “conjugal partner” while his wife also lived there and then stayed with him through his wife moving in with another man. This from Wikipedia. I was just sitting here, about to begin my book review, and I thought, “gee, I should probably know a

Middlemarch: On Eliot and Reading qua Education--Whether Non-AI writing is "Elitist" These two concepts are so entangled in my mind right now: Middlemarch and literacy. I’ve been reading Middlemarch for nearly four months and am finally about to finish, during a time when my own literacy has faltered, a time when I can distinguish which of my Creative Writing students are readers, a time when culture claims that our education system is failing us, a time when a friend has tol

2 June 2026 Preamble, I guess: Before I share this poem, it may be helpful to know a few things. First, although this reads as an elegy, it is not. My father lives in upstate New York. He is a very active person, a civil engineer, but of late he has been unable to do some of the activities he once loved, as he is battling the most aggressive of cancerous brain tumors: glioblastoma. Luckily, he was a member of a very successful (for him) immunotherapy trial which you can read

I planted a tree today. Angry. Just one of innumerable activities I’d choose over reading a tech bro’s manifesto justifying heuristics in writing —intellectual laziness— although my belief in intellectual rigor as a virtue is on chapped and crumbling ground. I planted two trees today and attempted to ignore the bracken-concealed discarded “For Sale” sign; the empty, smashed, label-less, 20oz green plastic Sprite bottle; and the deteriorating wooden picnic table down the hil

my decision to refuse AI in my writing, my classroom, and my life 8 April 2026 It’s Not Personal; It’s Political: Six Reasons I Choose to Refuse AI in My Writing, My Writing Classroom, and My Life Before I Even Begin : in case you are not familiar with the Refuse AI movement, please explore the ideas founding this movement on this Refuse AI Blog: Refusal.blog . So far in my writing career, I have resigned never to be a political writer. I’ve read my fair share of Joan D