FREDERIC TUTEN FOUND A NEW JOY

“At this time of my life–someone would say, the winter of my life, although I don’t feel cold,” Frederic Tuten, novelist, essayist, short story writer, and art critic, tells of finding a new joy in painting.  “Practically no day passes where I’m not either writing and painting or painting and writing, whichever comes first in…

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ZELDA’S LEGACY

On March 10, 1948, at 48, Zelda Fitzgerald, widow of F. Scott, died in a fire in a locked hospital room during the last of her many confinements for chronic mental illness. Variously diagnosed as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, at least one biographer asserts that a major objective of her treatment was to restore her…

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MY CONTRIBUTION TO THE LATEST INTERFACES ISSUE

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Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image and my contribution to it–an extended essay on writer and conceptual artist Roberta Allen along with an on-camera interview with her in 2021.  Note this is not the brief commentary previously posted but an expanded discussion of the prolific author Allen and her…

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The Two Sides of Peter Selgin

A two-fisted writer-artist, Peter Selgin, award-winning novelist, essayist, memoirist, and short story writer, earned his living as a freelance artist for thirty-six years, before deciding to abandon the visual arts for the literary in 2009. By 2014, well into his writing career and established as a professor of creative writing he realized he could not separate the writer from the artist. That they needed each other.

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ENJOY THE LATEST ISSUE OF INTERFACES

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Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image. This issue focuses on format. By that is meant the vehicle selected by a creator — a writing or a painting, for example — to express her ideas.   Included is my extended essay and on-camera interview with Fernando del Paso, among the greatest Spanish language novelists of the last 100 years, who began drawing to kill time between news reports while working at the BBC and before he knew it was being exhibited alongside leading figures in the art world.  Also included is my review of “The Lehman Trilogy,” which utilizes a stripped-down set and localizes and identifies characters through language, and telescopes more than a century into a few hours. Click on the link and enjoy!

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Fernando del Paso: “I dream that I paint, and I paint the dream.”

With the 2015 award of the Cervantes Prize, Fernando del Paso’s place among the greatest of Spanish literary figures was cemented.  Acclaimed as both novelist and essayist, the Surrealist-influenced del Paso was also an internationally exhibited artist whose work, both in ink and paint, offers precisely rendered, dream-like images that juxtapose and merge the real and the fantastic.  

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Enjoy the latest issue of INTERFACES

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FacebookTwitterShare Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image. This issue focuses on format and the myriad ways writers, artists, sculptors, and photographers play with format to achieve their effects.  Included is my extended essay and on-camera interview with Peter Sacks who began making the tiniest of images rendered with a…

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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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