Monthly Archives: April 2014

Grammar Class I: Shorties, Hemingway and Faulkner

For several years, I’ve been teaching a course at Bennington College called “Through Syntax to Style.”  It’s (hold on) a grammar course.  That’s right.  I know: college students?  Still, here the point is not to teach old-style grammar with diagramming (everyone asks), for the Bennington students are generally well-prepared syntactically;

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Posted in Grammar Class, Writing & Teaching


The World of Oryx, Crake, Zeb, Toby, and Snowman the Jimmy

Build worlds, that’s what novelists do, and then they fill them with their people.  Sometimes these fictional worlds are separated from ours by the thinness of tissue paper, and by the time lag of a minute.  Other times they are moonscapes, unrecognizable to our eyes, set in years long past or years far yet to come. 

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Posted in Oryx/Crake, Writing & Teaching


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