Smart Girls II: The Ambition Game, a Thursday panel at AWP 2010, included “Thirteen Short Meditations on the Word Smart,”  read by Karen McElmurray, author of Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven.

So, as always, I admire Steve Almond, but this time it is for getting his shit together enough upon his return back from AWP to actually write something for The Rumpus about it. He’s so not kidding about brain dead.

Well, last year it was in Chicago in February, and I was like “who the bleep goes to Chicago in February?”

“I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.” Does this line of Gertrude Stein’s help justify-for the pen and paper types-the digitalization of language?

“I came to realize that the feeling isn’t about age so much as it is about finally paying attention to what it is you really want in life. And that realization requires us to set aside our assumptions about how life works and what we should be doing,