Michael Ansara is cofounder of Mass Poetry. His most recent book of poems is What Remains, published in 2022 by Kelsay Books. Submit poems to [email protected]. Include your full name, […]
Books & Poetry
BATTLEGROUND
Britney Spears’s Search for Decency
The pop singer’s memoir is a graceful retelling of traumatic truths
People have always felt free to say whatever they want about Britney Spears’s personal life. This was true at the beginning of her career when she was in her teens […]
POETRY
Two Poems and an Invitation
Strange creatures and other miracles of summer
Summers By Robert Kuttner I’ve often wondered How the summer of ’39 felt People savoring ordinary joys The dread of doom just over the hill Or the summer of 1914 […]
BOOKS
‘Our Strangers’ Offers Big Provocations in Bite-Size Stories
Lydia Davis finds wit in the senselessness of 21st-century life
In the story “Caramel Drizzle,” Lydia Davis begins with a simple but disorienting question, rendered in quotation marks and without attribution: “Caramel syrup or caramel drizzle?” How are those choices, […]
THE INTERVIEW
Resurrecting Susan Dimock, a Shipwrecked Heroine
Susan Wilson’s story of a nearly forgotten pioneering woman surgeon
Susan Dimock was a celebrated surgeon in the 19th century who died in a shipwreck in 1875 at age 28. In her short life she’d become a light of her […]
IN THE WOODS
Poets From Mexico Build New Worlds in Wellfleet
A Modern House Trust residency on development and design
WELLFLEET — When five Mexican and Mexican-American poets, artists, and architects arrived at the modernist houses that dot the seashores and backwoods here in early October, they had “the best […]
THE INTERVIEW
The Provincetown Writer Who’s Watching You
Heidi Jon Schmidt draws universal truths from life in one small town
You may be checking out at the grocery store, strolling with a friend, or waiting in line for the ATM. You’re talking to the people around you or just staring […]
ARTISTS AND WRITERS
New Kids on the Block
20 fellows arrive at the Fine Arts Work Center
On Pearl Street in Provincetown, the Fine Arts Work Center’s new fellows are settling into their apartments and studios. For now, the spaces are all but empty. The white, unadorned […]
BOOKS
Charles Busch’s Life as a Leading Lady
Just don’t call him a drag queen
Charles Busch — the renowned “male actress” of stage and film, playwright of dozens of shows including Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which ran for five years off-Broadway, and the Broadway […]
BOOKS
In ‘How to Live,’ Kelle Groom Investigates the Meaning of Home
A Provincetown poet’s new memoir is an odyssey toward compassion
The moment Kelle Groom opens the gray door to her second-floor Brewster Street apartment, a hold-onto-your-hats breeze marking the change in seasons sneaks through. Poetry collections by Nick Flynn, Marie […]
WOMEN’S WEEK
Katherine Ann Power’s Story of Surrender and Redemption
Still looking to change the world, aware that ‘deep change takes time’
Katherine Ann Power is 74 years old and happily married to her wife of 15 years. She’s a proud grandmother. She has just gotten her hair cut, and on this […]
PROVINCETOWN BOOK FESTIVAL
Bending Gender, Genre, and Reality’s Fabric
In Isle McElroy’s fiction, identity is volatile, permeable, and relational
In a country of unpredictable roving “man hordes” reported to have “mowed twenty-six lawns in Drain, Illinois” and “kicked a German shepherd to death in Plano, Texas,” a canceled feminist […]
PROVINCETOWN BOOK FESTIVAL
A Maiden Voyage for an ‘Aging Pervert’
Janet W. Hardy’s radical queer savvy comes to Provincetown
By a strange twist of fate, the Provincetown Book Festival, hosted by the public library and running Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 this year, always seems to happen the same […]
BOOKS
Alice Hoffman Sounds an Echo of Hawthorne’s Warning
Her latest novel is a meditation on The Scarlet Letter
Alice Hoffman’s short story titled “Property Of” was published in the prestigious literary journal American Review: The Magazine of New Writing in 1975 when Hoffman was 23. I read the […]
THE INTERVIEW
How Patti Hartigan Came to Write August Wilson’s Story
The longtime arts journalist finished her biography of the playwright in Provincetown
Eight years ago, the arts journalist and critic Patti Hartigan noticed something missing from the cultural landscape. August Wilson, a playwright whose works she cherished and had written about for […]
