I went to my first AWP in Seattle in 2023, anxious and green. I’m an academic; conferences stress me out. The AWP was my foray into the world of creative writing and nothing like what I knew. It’s possible that writers don’t know how to have superficial conversations, or maybe they just don’t want to ..read more

The relinquishing of niceness is a difficult task, especially if you have been socialized into it forever. Learning how to be small took all of my girlhood, learning the opposite will take all of my adulthood ..read more

The following playlist is humbly submitted for your listening pleasure from Full Stop, your full service literary journal. We used to invoke the immortal and ominous words of Prince Buster, “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think,” but having recently moved to Scotland I’ll invoke the immortal and precise words of Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Inglan is a bitch ..read more

Conglomeration only seems to be accelerating . . . we need to understand how it impacts what we read and how we read it ..read more

Through the ventriloquist act of fiction, I could finally admit to the parts of myself and my situation that I was too nervous or scared or ashamed to see ..read more

Unlike with a fat crime novel, where plot is king and words are more like soldiers going off to battle in wave after wave, these words are precisely chosen to maximize the spareness of the prose ..read more

[Kearse's hero] has been hurt by the carefully constructed cruelty of capitalism and doesn’t so much want to lift the veil but set it ablaze ..read more

Our complicity in capitalist transactions does not have to prevent us from learning together . . . If we acknowledge the reality of students as consumers of a (usually exorbitantly priced) liberal arts education, we can better understand how they are interacting with us . . . with one another, and with the administration. We can let go of the increasingly stale idea that the classroom or campus is ever a pristinely objective or neutral space ..read more

The drama of recent Syrian history—the reign of the dictatorial Assad family, the brutal civil war begun in 2011—plays out in the struggle of one single consciousness trapped in its gears ..read more

Jews across the diaspora . . . have been vocally demanding a ceasefire and organizing to take action. They are part of the long Jewish tradition of criticizing Israel and Zionism, which has existed as long as the idea of Israel ..read more