Columns

ChatGPT Is A Menace

June 9th, 2023

Images via Cottonbro Studio & Pixabay I have two writing lives: by day I’m a mild-mannered content writer. By night I hug my Master’s In Creative Writing as I weep while staring at the blurry card a literary agent gave me in 2010.

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9 Queer YA Books to Help You Celebrate Pride

June 7th, 2023

It’s the most magical time of the year: Pride! A whole month to celebrate queer and trans identities. This year there’s so much on the line — from anti-trans legislations to the proliferation of “don’t say gay" bills to the increase in book bans, it’s crucial that the LGBTQ+ community and our allies come together not just to celebrate but also to fight back!

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Book vs. Film: "The Boogeyman"

June 5th, 2023

Stephen King adaptations are the very definition of “hit or miss.” For every Carrie, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Shining (1980), there’s a Graveyard Shift, Dreamcatcher, and The Shining (1997). Especially worrisome are those movies that take only a sliver of King’s original work and then set out on their own, as was the case with The Lawnmower Man. 

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My Body is Ready for Craig Clevenger's "Mother Howl"

June 2nd, 2023

Cover image: craigclevenger.com Let me take you back to the mid-2000’s, and instead of giving you some cultural references to the time, I just want to say I was SO hot back then. Like, really, I peaked early. If you take nothing else away from this: Peter Derk was a catch in the mid 2000’s, and you missed out.

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Celebrate Pride with These Speculative Graphic Novels

May 31st, 2023

I’ve been having a lot of discussions about gender and sexuality lately, and as a new mom (and a cisgendered woman), it’s something I’m hyper aware of now that I’m raising a little human, one who I forever want to be supportive of and able to intelligently talk to and interact with. As such, I’ve been reading a ton, not only for her, but because I want to be a source of comfort and allyship for my students and for those around me in my community.

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Internet Archive Is NOT Like Your Library

May 29th, 2023

Image: Pixabay Because internet people get all hot about this and then go into a rage where they make terrible points, usually using the wrong form of “its,” let’s start this column at the end, then go back and fill in the rest.

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Mystery Loves Company

May 24th, 2023

A few years ago, as I was on a Blue Line train on my way to the loop in Chicago, I was reading Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (Apex, 2016) and listening to Hole’s Celebrity Skin (DGC, 1998). At the exact moment that I read the phrase “all dressed in white” on page 57 of Rosewater, Courtney Love sang the same phrase in my ears on the song “Use Once & Destroy.” 

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Meet the 2022 Bram Stoker Awards® Poetry Nominees

May 22nd, 2023

Once again the Bram Stoker Awards® have served up five incredible new collections for poetry readers and lovers of dark prose to enjoy. Here we look at each collection in turn, with quotes from the poets on what they hope readers learn from their poetry.

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The Disappointing Over-Simplification of Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches

May 18th, 2023

If you were a teenage girl in the 90s, you were either a Vampire Girl, a Witch Girl, a Horse Girl, or you were popular. Suffice it to say, I’ve been wanting an adaptation of Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy since before I had a driver’s license. But even as a 90s weirdo tween, I still understood that the book was so long the story would be unadaptable. 

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On Readability: The Joy Of Reading Plays Part 2

May 15th, 2023

images: Yale University Press / Methuen Drama Recently I had the first eight pages of a play I’ve been working on read aloud by actors at the Inkwell Theatre’s monthly virtual Playwrights Night. The first chunk of this work features a lot of stage direction up front, including a significant amount of “stage business” (wordless actions performed by actors onstage).

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