Why do writers love being self-destructive and excessive?

What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written, hmmm?

“Creative writing is not literary writing as has been understood for all of the history of writing. Creative writing is a subset of therapy, with the same essential modalities — except, like everything else in our culture, it comes in a stripped, dumbed down version that partakes little of the rigors of psychotherapy.” -Anis Shivani

The Knox Writers’ House is a kind of insane expansive recording projects where three rad people went all across the U.S. interviewing and recording writers reading their work and work they love. Literally hours upon hours of audio & text content from a huge array, from Heather Christle to Carole Maso.

Janaka Stucky wrote about Amazon vs independent bookstores at the Poetry Foundation.

Issue 2 of Aesthetix, a journal that asks poets to submit poems of a specific title each issue, is live for “Arrow,” including new work from Melissa Broder, Mark Leidner, Emily Kendal Frey, Nick Sturm, Seth Landman, Bruce Covey, Ben Mirov, Noelle Kocot, ‎Noah Falck, more.

Samuel Beckett: “The writer is like a foetus trying to do gymnastics.”

Stacey Levine on Ryan Boudinot: “This one whom some were following was calm and restrained. His work shows so much work. Thousands of bees in his brain. His work makes its own ceiling, then bursts the ceiling again and again. Those calm, compact manners and the close shave. But you sense at any moment the gentlemanly restraint could fall away. At the spelling bee he was the most polite of them all. He is not in love with the normal. But I think he dislikes the abnormal, because, after all, the normal and its trajectory is so much more complicated and interesting.”

Q: How much distance is there between David Foster Wallace–the narrator–and yourself?

DFW: I don’t understand the question?

– Full interview from 1998 at Slate

Can anyone verify, preferably from a source other than the internet, that Samuel Beckett drove a young André the Giant to school?