Author: John Poplett
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Living Poetically According to Kierkegaard
The Romantics believed in the ideal of “living poetically.” Today many people believe in the notion of the self-made person. Kierkegaard is suspicious of these kinds of ideas. What are his objections and concerns? The expression “living poetically” connotes a libertine, a person who marches to his own drummer, follows rules of their own whimsical…
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On Revision and Jack Kerouac
On George Saunders’s Story Club, a fellow clubber remarked on “the illusion of natural genius”. It reminded me, by way of contrast, of Edison’s “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” axiom. Some authors may be good at their craft but they’re also often good or even better at creating the “illusion”. Jack Kerouac comes to mind. It’s…
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The Perils of the Socratic Method in Modern Times
When I went to a small liberal arts college, Marlboro College, in southern Vermont in the eighties, a “Great Books” program and various other study choices immersed me in the Socratic method more so than I had ever realized. In fact only recently, over forty years later, taking a massively open online course (MOOC) on…
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An Oversharer’s Cautionary Tale
In 2019 I decided I was ready to pitch my first novel, Schopenhauer in Love, to literary agents for the first time. I taught myself how to write a query letter, researched agents for those most likely to have an interest in a work of historical fiction about a 19th century German philosopher[1], read the…
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You Can’t Chop Your Mother Up In Massachusetts
It was the fall of 2014. I had returned from a delirious trip to my first writer’s retreat in North Carolina, not knowing that my mother, Carolyn, had dementia. I had clues, two of her siblings had already died from it, but denial being the stock and trade of the human race, I gallantly did…