Karen Douglass, Author

Karen Douglass, Author: Prose & Poetry

Reader’s REvision

Since my first year in grad school I have read John Fowles’ The Magus repeatedly. I’ve read the original version and I’ve read the revised version he published twelve years later. There’s no counting the copies I’ve owned, including at one time a first edition and a signed paperback. They have all gone away, sold or donated…

December 17, 2016
Lies & Disbelief

I like to believe that I’ll write best selling books for a decade to come, that money and health will last until I die suddenly in my sleep, my obit featured in the NY Times. I tell myself that one more burger with fries won’t hurt me. Electronics are made by sweetly smiling fairies in cloud…

December 10, 2016
Time’s UP!

There’s a song from the 1950s, “Little Things Mean a Lot.” I agree. Little words mean a lot. Comedian George Carlin (may he rest in peace) once said that rather than get on the plane, he would prefer to get in the plane. Think about it. So the little word for today is up. Campaigning…

December 3, 2016
My City Follows Me Around

Yesterday I read Benjamin Percy’s essay “Move Mountains: Activate Setting” (AWP Chronicle, Vol 49, No 3, Dec 2016, 98-105). He makes a convincing case for orienting the reader to place and giving place agency in the story. Things must happen that could not happen just anywhere. Although not exactly news to me, Percy makes a good argument…

November 26, 2016
Cowardly Reader

I admit it, I sometimes start books but set them aside before I finish. Right now LaRose, by Louise Erdrich, has been on my coffee table far too many days. Erdrich is a talented novelist and her work is important, illuminating as she does the lives of Native Americans when they fray from contact with the…

November 19, 2016