What would be your ideal meal to eat on a wide, deteriorating balcony overlooking misshapen live oak branches, in the middle of a hot New Orleans summertime? What time of day would you suggest partaking of this meal? (It’s low 70′s in the morning and high 90′s by afternoon.) The meal: it would always be evening for […]

AB Dreams/Writing update: I made a discovery about a dream that my narrator had about herself. She saw herself as a bog woman, a wet suit, bloated, rank-smelling in the murk of a marsh. This makes more sense to me than a dollhouse-self, or a dollhouse head, which I think is what her grandmother’s self […]

Nola Studiola Question 2, continued I work best in the morning in my study and when I’m having coffee.  I travel a lot and I have learned to find ways of creating spaces where I like to write.  Most important is the laptop on which I write.  I love the feeling of the keys and […]

Irv’s answer to question 2 reminds me of Cixous–and I think,  a “project” is just an extension of our thoughts, and we can’t order it the way we “order” work, and a “beginning” might just be a hard-to-pin down accessing of a pool of thoughts we’ve already known and have been swimming in for quite […]

Here it is…we’re getting our interviews rolling here at the Studiola! Our first visitor is Irv Peckham: scholar, teacher, activist, musician and mountain biker. I will tell you one thing before we talk more with Irv. I met Irv’s late wife Sarah during a time of personal turmoil. She was one of those people who […]

Dr. Peckham is a Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Louisiana State University.  He is the author of Going North, Thinking West: The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction, and numerous articles on assessment and the relationship of writing to social class. In his personal life, Irvin is a grass-roots musician, a […]

I am back in NOLA! I have been jumping around and spending lots of time in Baton Rouge until my lease is up and my boyfriend moves away up north. I ate food my friend left under the beautiful arches of the largest bouquet of flowers anyone has ever given me. HUGE–and the bouquet included […]

Page numbers and symbols, as my friend K in NYC says, are helpful to beginning to order one’s novel world. So that happened today in the composition book. I tend to use hearts and geometric shapes from high school essay writing days. “Get ready to manage  a ton of data,” said one writer in response […]

  When I was about 12, I made mushroom ice cream. Twice. The first time was a bored accident–steamed mushrooms in a half-eaten bowl of ice cream. A cry for help from an artist seeking her medium. Ha. The second time I was purposeful: I sauteed a box of mushrooms in butter and garlic, then […]

What I know so far is that routines are important and that goals are important. I’ve stuck to my 5 handwritten pages a day. One day it took me 5 hours to get there. Today maybe just 3. Charles Bukowski once wrote: “The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.” These are trying to be […]