(This is the text of a talk delivered last night at Luther College, with responses from student attendees pasted at the end!) Intro music: Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Books for the chalk tray: Taplin, Snyder, Lanier, Orwell, Haidt, Pomerantsev, Arendt, me, YOUNG ROMANTICS, and more. Welcome, and thank you all for being here. Thanks […]
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This year I’ve tried two ways – printmaking and welding – to get under the dirty, stubborn skin of William Blake. Both rely on fire to inscribe your intention and an elemental ground – paper or metal – to preserve and transmit it. Both ask you to dedicate yourself to learning an art that won’t […]
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One week ago, likely-not-for-much-longer British PM (and probably-soon-to-be-gratefully-reverted-hedgie/tech-bro) Rishi Sunak left the 80th anniversary D-Day celebrations at Normandy early to return to London and prerecord a TV campaign interview. Footage of that moment shows the host murmuring thank you for being here. Just back from Normandy, Sunak says. “It ran over.” Offense piled on offense, […]
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Suitably for a book featuring such a large number of Luther Creative Writing alums, Advanced Fiction has just been featured in a lovely alumni-magazine story by Kate Frentzel. Take a look!
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Delighted to announce that my novel Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley and FRANKENSTEIN will be published by Sea Crow Press in the spring of 2025. Students, friends, and family know this has been a long journey (especially to get its first draft of 236,000 words down to a manageable length!), but I am thrilled […]
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Thanks to Prof. Jonathan Taylor for featuring me and Advanced Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology on his “Creative Writing at Leicester” blog here: http://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/07/amy-e-weldon-advanced-fiction-writers.html
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It’s official: actor Julian Sands has passed at age 65, after disappearing while hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains. He was a great actor – and also a genuine aficionado of literature. His work offered me an artist’s great gift: a small-town kid’s early intuition that the world can be grand and beautiful beyond its […]
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“May you live in interesting times,” says an apocryphal Chinese curse. And for a Romanticist writing about Byron, boxing, and the celebrity culture of Regency England, the news that AI can now fake even more human creations is “interesting” indeed. Now AI has made a “song” by Drake and The Weeknd that neither artist authorized […]
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Teaching can be a challenge. But then life hands you an event that banishes questions about the “relevance” of multiple texts you’re teaching, all at once. Come for the Frankenstein, stay for the Half-Earth, Our Malady, and Nineteen Eighty-four. (With a side of Mrs. Dalloway – what IS that thing in the sky everyone’s looking […]
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