I think alongside assigning books for students to read, we should also show them how great it is to be a reader.

This is the longest story I have ever written. It is also the most meaningful. It will go out in The Small Bow's newsletter tomorrow. You can read it here now: www.thesmallbow.com/p/consider-t...

Now that I've signed the contract, excited to share my first book "Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change" is forthcoming with @openbookpublish.bsky.social! Much more info about it on the publisher site here. www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

New from New American Canon www.instagram.com/p/DXrmrK3jfI...

The gospel singer Mavis Staples‘s recent albums affirm “the importance, even necessity, of putting trust in the people around you,” writes Sophie Abramowitz. “No ‘I’ gets by alone.”

Listen I read a lot, and a lot of it is dull as hell, and I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned: tedious writing is almost always a product of the writer conveying, rather than discovering. When a writer is discovering, or sharing discovery, no editor on earth can scrub out the vividity & joy.

Sharing some professional news: In a few months, I’ll be joining @pomonacollege.bsky.social as an Assistant Prof of English and the Director of College Writing. My plan is to continue blinking in disbelief for the foreseeable future

Abstracts are due today for POETRY'S PROGRAM ERA INSTITUTIONS--a seminar at ASAP/17 in Madison this October. A heavy line-up is shaping up--join us! @asapartsnow.bsky.social

Last chance, friends interested in academic novels & administration (and even have worked in it, as directors of study or associate chairs or program heads or whatever you people call yourselves) & might want to be on a roundtable. Got some submissions, looking to round things out, let me know.

New essay about some creeps, contemporary and canonical, in the history of the novel. I'm thinking about the nexus of the romance plot, commercial surveillance, and "the desire of the other." DM me for a PDF!

It was a treat to talk with @andeamarzocchi.bsky.social about writer's block in literary fiction on @smallgoodpodcast.bsky.social Listen here: www.spreaker.com/episode/writ...

New episode out today (you really don’t want to miss this one)! What can fictional representations of blocked short story writers teach us about writer’s block and what causes it? Listen to this episode with @acolton.bsky.social to find out! Listen here: www.spreaker.com/episode/writ...

Seasons are such a scam. Hoodie weather for 345 days a year is what I want

Was lucky to have @manshel.bsky.social's article on high-school English on hand in today's seminar on Percival Everett. The mock novel in Erasure is described as "the kind of book they will be reading in high schools thirty years from now"—the students spent a whole class unpacking that line!

@modernlanguage.bsky.social CFP: session sponsored by Association of Departments of English on academic novels and administration call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/02/... #MLA2027 #CFP #AcademicNovel #CampusNovel #Administration #DepartmentChair #Leadership #CriticalUniversityStudies

Three weeks left to apply!

Much as GoFundMe is no replacement for national health care, ten thousand individual newsletters by really excellent writers is no replacement for their institutional employment.

I LOVE @thesundaylongread.bsky.social and frequently peruse for new stories to teach. Such a fun surprise to see my Doomsday Clock piece in this week’s edition!

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com. ‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’ economist.com/united-state...

Coming soon to a faculty workshop near you!

How rad it was to be on KSQD (K-Squid!) talking with @pkreports.bsky.social about writer's block in fiction and practice. Podcast below!

The Emory Writing Program Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship application is now open! 3/3 teaching in first-year writing with opportunities to design/instruct upper-level classes in rhet/comp. Renewable up to three years. All PhDs with experience/interest in writing are welcome to apply—share widely!

I don’t know, books do this pretty well without having to fine tune them for outputs.

inspired by @acolton.bsky.social's Writing Through Writer's Block today: "...for writers struggling with perfectionism, procrastination, fear of failure, evaluation anxiety, or... predetermination that one is, inherently, a 'bad writer,' the fiction of writer’s block offers an invaluable resource."

This piece gets at one of the underlying reasons students turn to LLMs - because they think it makes them sound like they belong in a university setting. It's the same motive that had students overusing the thesaurus pre-ChatGPT. theimportantwork.substack.com/p/chatgpt-an...

"The book review is central to what we do—and who we are. It is a relish worthy of savor, a form of communion that is as learned as it is precious." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care...

I think it would be fun if writers who love language started intentionally writing more strangely as AI flattens written "content" into a mono-voice. it would cool I think if writers responded by focusing their individual efforts on cultivating a really unique voice that's hard to copy

Love (x1,000) this promo photo of the book from U of Iowa Press!

It's pub day (birthday 0?) for Writing Through Writer's Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction! This is a study of how authors have used the archetype of the blocked writer to identify, analyze, and ultimately work through both internal and external constraints on their creative abilities.

What actually beats writer's block: understanding writing as ordinary labor; analyzing standards set by genre, audience, institution, or market; taking charge of one's relationship with those standards; and seeing half-formed ideas through before evaluating their potential. No AI needed

No grift here. Preorder Aaron's book!

My book (made possible by @samcohen.bsky.social) on why fiction writers are always, always writing about writer's block is out next week (yikes!). It centers critiques of literary institutions/markets and compositional lessons for real writers. Consider pre-ordering! BLOCK40 will discount by 40%

It’s the official publication day for Painful Forms! I’m so pleased to see the book out in the world and grateful forever to @uncpress.bsky.social for making that happen. uncpress.org/978146968894...

Another plug that my lab @nmsu.edu will be admitting up to 2 PhD students this year (application deadline: January 15th). We study (eyewitness) memory, metacognition, and individual differences. More information here: www.grab-lab.com

I don’t think a long book is even primarily about plot, or character, or any of the patterned information on its pages. A long book is practicing over time a way of being in the world. Reading even a very good summary is not the same as giving over some portion of your own life to that practice.

Mail call! New from New American Canon, @acolton.bsky.social's Writing Through Writer's Block uipress.uiowa.edu/books/writin...

In my mailbox today, a book well worth reading.

I think we’re really going to have to do a lot more of this. A massive deprogramming so that people can read more than ten words at a time without anxiety. www.thetimes.com/uk/education...?

I'm interviewed in @forbes.com this week about how students can't develop as writers if they don't also develop as readers, how AI tools diminish students' original thinking, and—so long as it remains a genre—how to write a meaningful college admissions essay. www.forbes.com/sites/lizdoe...

Increasingly, what makes sense to me is framing a class as a *dialogic community* and assessing students on their contributions as members of that community. Such contributions can be and should be as spontaneous as they are regulated. +

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

Really appreciated this discussion with @tressiemcphd.bsky.social on AI in higher ed and what we and students are losing in terms of opportunities to go from struggling to mastering something, and learning as a relational/social process. www.nytimes.com/audio/app/20...

The book, it has a cover!

Review deadline extended: July 9! There is still time to apply to the Curator of Literary & Poetry Collections position at Emory! apply.interfolio.com/167978 I’m very happy to speak to folks about this role! This is a phenom. opportunity to work with a stellar staff and unparalleled collections!

Hello! I would be happy to help. You can email me lollardfish at gmail with a draft of a piece and a pitch and I will help you refine it to improve your chances of being published. I mean this. I've helped a few dozen people these last six months.

Proofs! Read all about the figure of the blocked writer in American fiction this fall! (With gratitude to the inimitable @samcohen.bsky.social for supporting the project)