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Terrible, title, eh? But I speak not as a Seventies holdout but of something a bit more universal: Stubborn pursuit of the irrelevant, failing to see the obvious, getting stuck in grooves. It happens to all of us. It accompanies youth as well as ageing, and it comprises every personality type from those who seem to grind away at the same thing every day to those who seem to float from one thing to another.

Over spring break, I visited paradise, aka my brother-in-law’s multi-million-dollar vacation home in Cabo San Lucas at the very tip of the Baja peninsula.  A Mexican Manderlay replete with a…    read more

Selected audio outtakes from the print interview which appears in our Spring 2007 issue.

So this is how it goes at my house. This morning when I opened my eyes, I turned to look across the pillows at my husband and smiled. He lovingly smiled back, yawned, and then asked, “Name five literary novels written in the last five years or so that are a must-read.”

Toward the end of last week I became aware that I was having something that could only be called a bad week. It was tangibly bad. The badness was not an aura; it had weight. It was like a slunking creature following me and creating snickering disturbances behind me that fouled up everything I tried. Or like having a fat gargoyle on my shoulder. The word “gargoyle” comes from the French “gargouiller,” to gurgle, because gargoyles once functioned primarily as spouts on gutters. The gargoyle on my shoulder was gurgling and then drooling on everything I touched, sort of the reverse of the Midas touch-everything the associate editor touched turned to drool, including, I fear, some of my edits.

It’s been about three weeks since our staff returned from the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference, held this year in Atlanta, and for the first time I can catch my breath and reflect on my time there.

My stepfather Joe Ozark died on March 4th; he was seventy-five. Three ex-wives, three children, three stepchildren, and scads of grandchildren, I’d say he had a full life.

Several TMR authors and one about-to-be TMR author have new or recent books out. Michele Morano, whose troubling essay <a href="http://www.missourireview.com/content-index.php?genre=Nonfiction&title=About+Wayne" appeared in Volume 23, Number 2, recently published Grammar Lessons, Translating a Life in Spain (University of Iowa Press). Grammar Lessons is a memoir of Morano's first year living in Spain, in the early '90s, and of the process of learning a new culture, as reflected and "ruled" by the language of that culture.