Frederic Tuten Fulfills a Youthful Fantasy

  “George Moore said, ‘School … killed the life of love and art.’ I would not let it kill me.” As a young teenager, distinguished novelist and short story writer Frederic Tuten dreamed of being a painter and living in Paris. Inspired by such books as George Moore’s memoir, Confessions of a Young Man, and…

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How Peter Sacks Joined the Greats

  “Paint seems more embedded in the cosmos than language.” The Poet Picked Up a Paintbrush You are about to witness a historic moment. A little more than twenty years ago, Peter Sacks, a successful poet and Harvard professor, decided to pick up a paintbrush for the first time. Today, hailed internationally, his work is…

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Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, “there is no frame in writing.”

Evan Hunter

Among the very rare group of writers whose books have sold over 100 million copies, the inventor of the police procedural with his dozens of 87th Precinct novels, the author of The Blackboard Jungle, and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” Evan Hunter as the boy Salvatore Lombino was art editor of his school…

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Louise Glück, Nobel Poet and Sometime Painter.

“I couldn’t bear the endless forfeits [painting] involved.” In her youth, Glück painted which, in her essay “Education of the Poet,” she describes as “a small gift.” To this she adds, “Small but, like my other aptitudes, relentlessly developed. At some point in my late teens I realized I was at the end of what…

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Amiri Baraka: “Politics is to protect truth and beauty”

Amiri Baraka

“Politics is to protect truth and beauty.” Amiri Baraka, famed leader of the Black Arts Movement, was a poet, playwright, jazz critic, and actor. He was also a notorious political revolutionary who did not cease protesting despite arrests and beatings by the Newark police and struggling to install an honest government that would respond to…

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Enjoy the latest issue of INTERFACES

interfaces

Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image. This issue focuses on images and memories, with fascinating discussions ranging from fiction that uses photographs with its text, to Ken Burns’ recontextualizing photojournalism in his Vietnam War documentary and, as an added treat, my on-camera interview with Jules Feiffer, the brilliant…

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Susan Minot Paints Everything, Everywhere

Susan Minot

“I like to say ‘I write,’ or ‘I paint,’ and not ‘I am an anything.” The award-winning writer of novels, short stories, screenplays, and poems, Susan Minot says she grew up in a family in which everyone always had something before them to do with their hands. It is a habit that has stayed with…

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti is turning 100!

Happy 100th Birthday Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Legendary poet, artist, publisher and social activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti will celebrate his 100th birthday on March 24. My on-camera interview with him in 2001 has been edited into a four minute homage by Michelle Memran, producer and director of last year’s critically lauded film “The Rest I Make Up.” After producing no fewer than 30…

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Charlie Brown and Spider-Man inspired Clifford Thompson

Charlie Brown, Marvel, and Clifford Thompson: Inspired by Comics

Writer-Artist 14: Clifford Thompson “Being at odds with the world around you is a common theme among personal essayists, and my first model of an artistic treatment of such themes was Peanuts.” Writing and Art Were a Single Pursuit Even as a child of seven or eight, Thompson says his attempts at writing and art…

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I Am Honored by the Award- Winning Journal INTERFACES

interfaces

INTERFACES, The award-winning international journal of text and image, co-published, in French and English, by the College of the Holy Cross, the Sorbonne, and the University of Bourgogne, has done me the honor of making me a contributor. In the current issue, Maurice Géracht of Holy Cross introduces me and The Writer’s Brush interview series…

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