The thing that hits you - that comes stabbing out of the retiring night, looking for your heart - is the dread. There's a moment in the last third of Laila Lalami's "The Moor's Account Account" in which the incredible survival and emancipation of Mustafa, our dear protagonist, and the…
July's prompt - Write a story about a picnic: Nostalgia I hugged my glove and hustled behind the older boys, out of sight of the adults playing cards. The biggest boy swatted his glove with the heavy bat and then tossed that too. We didn't play. Instead they wanted me…
I started to do this thing: http://53wordstory.com/ Every month there's a guest judge and they provide you with a prompt. Your task is to write a 53 word story - no more, no less, exactly that - based on the prompt. The judge then judges you and selects…
I recently sat down with Randy Dixon and Tim Tracey - two brilliant improvisers and greatly influential teachers of mine. We delved into the craft, their personal histories with it, and the power it has over the performer and audience. Lucky for all, I recorded what they had to say…
I'm not one to use a word I can barely spell, but it was quite serendipitous that the 2014 Lahore Literature Festival overlapped with my last weekend in Pakistan. Beyond the thrill of seeing Mohsin Hamid ("Moth Smoke", "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"), Matthieu Aikens (reporter), and K. Anis Ahmed ("The World…
This is the jagged little birthplace of my parents. Well actually, that's not true. My parents were born before 1947, the year a couple of lines were drawn on an outdated map using outdated census data by a British lawyer suffering from great haste, hubris or maybe just constipation that…