Announcing MQR’s Open Call for Bloggers
By MQR Staff
We’re looking for writers with backgrounds in various disciplines to create unique, thought-provoking posts of interest to MQR’s online readership.
Writing
On Going Home
At the age of thirty-two, I have done the impossible and returned home—not for a holiday or a funeral, but to set up residency in a region of the Florida Panhandle so remote that even Comcast Cable has declined the opportunity to overcharge us for Internet service. I say “impossible” because that’s how the saying goes, doesn’t it, that a person “can’t go home again”—or at least Thomas Wolfe and Joan Didion made compelling cases.
Found In Translation
By Lillian Li
As evidenced by my previous blog posts, I have been drawn by the predicament of writing race, or writing difference. Without a doubt, I am still bothered by this question of how we, or really, I, want to go about training my work to resonate on numerous levels, without sacrificing honesty for clarity, without having to play the endless game of cultural catch-up for a mixed audience. Without a doubt, this stream of thought turns almost every thing that I read, watch, or otherwise consume into a potential craft lesson. The latest item to fall victim is a documentary that I consider one of my favorite movies: Jiro Dreams Of Sushi.
I Am What Is Missing: Our Stuff, Ourselves
By Leah Falk
A few years ago, I was teaching a middle school writing elective at a well-regarded summer camp for the arts. The students in this class were not primarily interested in writing: they were there as young musicians, or dancers, or studying “general arts” which usually meant their well-off parents thought it more edifying for them to draw with charcoal and write poems and create spliced-together musical theater out of the latest pop songs than to let them spend the summer watching TV and lighting matches in the backyard.
A Rant on Writers Who Dislike Craft, or Why I Still Like Vermeer
By Nathan Go
I don’t know what to say to writers who aren’t interested in craft. I don’t know what to say when they start invoking the primacy of the unconscious, of seeing the bigger picture, or of writing the plain damn Truth.
