Another fine literary magazine is closing shop. This time it’s Witcraft, an online publication that, for the past couple of years, offered up a daily dose of comic relief in the form of fiction and poetry.
Witcraft founder and editor Doug Jacquier (featured in a recent Friday Five) recently announced his plans in a message to subscribers and on his Substack. He wrote:
Continue reading “Farewell, Witcraft, and thanks for the laughs”
When I got the news yesterday that novelist Tom Robbins died last weekend (at age 92; how could he have been that old?), my memory swooped like the long-extinct Kauaʻi ʻōʻō back, back, back to 1981 or ’82 or so, when I first encountered Robbins’ writings in the form of his novel Still Life With Woodpecker.
A journalism student at the time and steeped in the dreary, staid, humorless learnings of newswriting, I read Still Life as a guilty pleasure. (I’m grateful to my girlfriend at the time who lent me her copy of this book, the perfect antidote to my gloomy, humorless J-school student outlook.) The way Robbins played with the language — even when he was over the top with it, which was often — enthralled me, and for a long time, throughout my college years and beyond, I tried on his writing style to see how it would fit.
Continue reading “Tom Robbins and the flexibility to endure”
Andy writes! 