The Missouri Review

I’m a believer in a liberal arts education and all that it stands for, including (but not limited to) the enhancement of critical reading and thinking skills, a broadened cultural perspective, an appreciation of the arts, and a context for determining why we’re here and what our purpose in life may be. That does not, [...]

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Good news this week for the English language, which welcomes into usage the term opposite marriage, courtesy of Miss California 2009, Carrie Prejean.
Political affiliation and current events knowledge aside, Prejean should be commended for having achieved accidentally through some miracle of ineloquence what many of us strive to do each waking hour: invent and [...]

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As study-dwellers, we spend a lot of time in spaces surrounded by paper. Our desktops, shelves, armrests, and pretty much every vertical surface is piled high with magazines, stacks of ungraded student papers, books, lists, diagrams . . . and that’s okay. We’re comfortable here.
But so are bugs. Thus, there are really only two [...]

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Bad news this week for Steve Martin, whose play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, was banned from being performed at an Oregon high school because some parents complained about its content. Martin, various news agencies report, has offered to pay for the play to be produced off-campus. I recommend reading the actual letter he sent [...]

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Out my window is the Gihon River, still mostly covered with ice, but the water peeks through in spots, and it’s rippling around a bend just beneath the bridge nearby. Vermont is cold in March–what isn’t covered with snow is gray and wet (the ground) or gray and dusty (the roads). But it’s paradise to [...]

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As one of over 600 volunteers at the True/False Film Fest this past weekend, I witnessed a passionate, diverse, and creative community–from international filmmakers to downtown dwellers–come together, transforming an already eclectic Columbia into a “small-town Midwestern utopia.”
My first assignment at The Blue Note, a renovated vaudeville house–now a popular music venue–overlapped with [...]

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Eric Daniel Metzgar’s Reporter profiles New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof’s work in the Congo. The film, screened last weekend at the True/False Film Fest, concentrated on Kristof’s relentless pursuit to find the face of the Congo. He found that face attached to the 60-pound body of a 41-year-old woman displaced by the warring lords [...]

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It was downright nippy last weekend here in Columbia, Missouri, but that didn’t keep my fiancee Neesha, her parents, and me away from the True/False Film Festival. Turns out, nothing gets a family talking like a solid piece of nonfiction filmmaking. We saw a whole bunch of films. Here’s the roundup on our favorites.
Loot
Remember how Bill [...]

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In addition to the dozens of docs screened during the True/False Film fest, a number of workshops and classes are offered. Wanting to deepen my knowledge of the industry, I checked out a couple, including “Hybrid Cinema: A Filmmaker’s Guide to DIY, Web and Self-Distribution.”
Jon Reiss, director of Bomb It, a doc about the “battle [...]

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Blood Trail centers on the work of freelance war photographer Robert King. The film shows King’s transition from a frightened and inexperienced nobody in Bosnia to a widely published and reliable correspondent in Iraq. . . .

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A teenager in a hoodie and frayed sneakers gave me a bright blue slip of paper. She wore a festival pass hanging from a metal lanyard–it said Volunteer and contained a sketch of a human heart. The slip she handed me said 156. I was number 156 in the Q line. 155 people would get [...]

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Last night, the True/False Film Fest (www.truefalse.org) launched its sixth annual festival with the screening of Afghan Star,directed by Havana Marking. First, though, festival co-founder David Wilson announced the winner of the Creative Short category of our annual Audio and Video Competition.
Anne Lewis takes home the top honors with “Separate Vacations,” an animated short about a narrator who [...]

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Bad news this week for people awed by the final frontier and the second-to-final frontier, which are apparently getting a tad crowded. The much-discussed collision of two satellites in low Earth orbit and the just-disclosed deep sea nuclear submarine fender-bender in the Atlantic Ocean indicate that it might be a good time to turn the [...]

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Word has it that our stand at AWP, along with several of our competent, cheerful interns and many innocent Chicagoans, was nearly torn apart by the clamoring throngs who had poured into the conference in the hopes of meeting me, only to find out that I didn’t go.
I’d like to take a moment to apologize. 
I’m sorry, folks. Thanks for making [...]

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Bad news this week for advocates of the apostrophe, and no, O gentle reader, I’m not talking about this kind of apostrophe — it’s doing just fine — I’m talking about the captain of contraction, the prince of possession, the hovering hero who hauls “he’ll” out of “hell.” Officials in the English city of Birmingham have decided [...]

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Good news this week for people who like holograms. An article just out in New Scientist says we all just might be living in one.
… I know, right? As I read the article I noticed my face mimicking the expression of the tiny framed Shakespeare hologram I have on my wall here, which I purchased from [...]

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Six days into January, people are still saying “Happy New Year” and expressing hope/doubt/nervousness/fear/anticipation about what will happen in this next calendar year. Having recently had an intense, out-of-time experience with a dying relative, I’d been thinking already . . .

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So, I am writing this post as an ode to my lovely fellow poetry readers at TMR. I have never been a part of an academic group so nerdy and so much fun in my entire life.
Before joining the poetry team at TMR I had all of these worries about my ability to analyze [...]

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The Ghost of Christmas Future, everyone will agree, is the most awesome and hardcore Christmas spirit of all the spooks and specters in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
His spectral cohorts, Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, are like a couple of hippie high school teachers, whereas he’s like that tyrant prof who ruined your 4.0 GPA in grad school.  They’re like, [...]

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As a few of my students at Stephens College and graduate students here at TMR prepare to graduate in May, I am reminded of the film Reality Bites about a group of over-educated, underemployed Generation Xers in Houston, Texas in the early 1990s. Reality hit that generation hard as they graduated into a recession [...]

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Frank Gannon, in his inspiring essay “English 99: Literacy Among the Ruins,” writes about trying to teach basic writing to an assortment of college freshmen that consisted mostly of bored/oblivious white suburbanite traditional students mixed in with a few shell-shocked Bosnian refugees.
In the piece, which originally ran in Harper’s, Gannon describes how he taught that “writing was an activity more than something that can [...]

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I know why books of poetry don’t sell. I witnessed part of the problem last month when I attended a conference put on by Missouri’s Center for the Book. Several of the local poets who were invited to read had also signed up to have tables at the book fair to sell their [...]

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Unlike some things — the UK lottery, apparently — you can’t win our audio contest if you don’t play. If you’re going to play, though, play to win!
The deadline is Dec. 1, and I know what you’re thinking. Not enough time, right? Then you learn that the payout is as much as $1500 for first prize, and you’re like, [...]

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As a teacher, I actively avoid complaining about student writing. In my first short fiction writing class as a student, I recall struggling with the concept of conflict. It took me a semester to understand why writing an unflattering portrait of my roommate wasn’t story enough. I had never heard of a [...]

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I just read an article on newly discovered sea creatures that reminds me of a wonderful little essay by Lewis Thomas. The essay’s titled “Seven Wonders.” Everybody should read it. It appears in Lewis’s collection, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a title that fits rather nicely with our latest List of the Week.
My first encounter with “Seven Wonders” was as an undergraduate at [...]

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Want to get noticed in a good way? Get out there and buy a sled. 
Today I discovered the power of the sled-bearer to bring joy to the masses. Everyone pays attention when a shopper carries a sled through a store. Some people even pause to compliment the sled and speculate as to the amount of fun that will be had with [...]

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I love clothes and have enjoyed the primaries and this election in part because all the candidates are so snappily dressed. We are well past the days when politicians were limited to power ties, button-down shirts and navy blue Brooks Brothers suits. Much of Washington has discovered designer duds.
Yet, female politicians and political [...]

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My apologies, folks. My TMR blog this week was going to be a comic strip, but Berkeley Breathed — my favorite cartoonist ever — is retiring his Opus character tomorrow, and, frankly, I’m just too sad.
If I may, a few words in remembrance of a beloved friend.
Farewell, gentle penguin. Many will remember you as [...]

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Time to address a seldom discussed but alarmingly common trend I’ve noticed in creative nonfiction submissions — a specific kind of essay I call the Embarrassing Restroom Adventure.  
The details of ERAs vary widely, limited only by the number of ways going to the bathroom can go horribly wrong. Still, almost all ERAs follow the same basic trajectory: narrator enters restroom and gets comfortable; [...]

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