Charlotte Lit’s Blog

Welcome to Charlotte Lit’s literary arts blog. What you’ll find here: reviews, interviews, craft essays, previews of literary arts events, and anything else that catches our attention.

Richard Allen Taylor

When You’re the Emcee

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Hosting a literary reading? Here’s poet Richard Allen Taylor on the fine points of being the emcee. Emcees worry about making the colossal gaffe. Just ask Steve Harvey, who famously announced the wrong winner in the Miss Universe pageant. A friend of mine, John B, made a less colossal mistake when he served as emcee […]

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Larry Sorkin

In the Evening We Shall Be Examined on Love

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In the Evening We Shall Be Examined on Love ~ St. John of the Cross That line was enough to propel Thomas Centolella into his moving poem of that title, and has been enough to stay with me as an iconic constant, a touchstone that I come back to like being aware of the intake […]

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Jenny Hubbard

How to be Kind to Your Reader: Some Thoughts on George Saunders

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George Saunders is big on kindness. When I read the convocation speech he gave at Syracuse University, which is now available to us in a book, Congratulations, By The Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, which I highly recommend, it got me wondering: if you write fiction, as Saunders does beautifully, is there such a thing […]

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Charles Israel

Terrestrial, Baby

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What you say after making love to your wife can crash-and-burn a marriage—or save it. Count what I said last night as a crash-and-burn. We had just made love for the first time in a long time. We were just rolling around our bedroom, laughing like we had the whole world to roll around on. […]

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