It’s perhaps a given that all artists repeat themselves. For some writers, variations on the same material are a career imperative—take, for example, any author of series mysteries. This isn’t a slight; I love to watch a writer I like go back to that well. Sometimes the minor changes that time imposes on the artist can result in exciting new directions for old material.

Dreams can offer non-writers the opportunity to ask a question writers ponder every day: what is interesting to other people? Nothing is more fascinating to you than a dream you just had, and nothing is more boring to others. The reason is context: when something strikes you as noteworthy in a dream, it’s because of the ways it departs from the ordinary. But only you know what counts as ordinary to you—and departures from it say more about you than they do about the dream’s subjects.

Part of the appeal of these distortions is, of course, nostalgia for the sounds of our youth; my generation taped songs off the radio with a low-fidelity cassette boombox, and the hopelessly corrupted results remain our head-canonical versions of the era’s hits. But the main appeal is the distance—subtle or extreme—that distortion puts between the music and its listener. Distortion is enigma; it transports us not back to the moment of a sound’s creation, but to the mysterious interstitial zone it has journeyed through.

The line is the thing that separates poetry from prose, and the thing I envy poets for most. Prose writers can break up text in all kinds of ways: the aforementioned punctuation marks, the paragraph break, the white space, the chapter break. Poets get to have all that, and lines, too. In poetry, enjambment is the term for breaking a line in the middle of a sentence or phrase. Poets use it to create a sense of drama, or to trick you, which are things poets love to do.

An investigation followed, during which it was revealed the the subjects knew they might be drugged and had signed release forms saying so; and the ones who were hospitalized already had histories of mental illness and drug addiction that could explain their reaction. As a result, no criminal charges were brought against Jumand—but the University cancelled his research and kicked him off campus. He eventually went on to form a quasi-utopian collective that lived in makeshift geodesic domes on some farmland outside of town, and died at 43 when he—accidentally, it’s believed—drove his bicycle off a cliff and into a waterfall.

In writing—both mine and my students’—there’s no predictable path to a final product. Sometimes the basic shape of a thing comes to you immediately, and the process that brings it to completion consists primarily of refinement. When this happens, editorial assistance is most valuable writ small: rhythm and pacing, sentence-level tweaks. But at other times, you don’t know what you have, or what, if anything, about it is the good part. You’re more open to people’s broad suggestions, which might send you in a new direction, and to the process of creation itself, which may bring you exciting surprises.

In my work as a teacher, I assign a lot of experimental writing prompts, with an eye towards nudging students out of their comfort zones and onto, I hope, unexpected vectors of self-discovery. My intro to creative writing course, in recent years, has consisted entirely of these prompts, one every week, two pages maximum. My thinking with these students, mostly sophomores, is that they don’t actually yet know what they’re capable of; the prompts force them to try different things. I’ve had lots of students whose best work in intermediate and advanced fiction classes grew out of these intro experiments.

Also pedestrian, quite literally, and also delightful, are the utility access panels embedded in every urban street, over which people walk and drive every day. They’re like utility access panels anywhere, except surprisingly diverse in style, embracing a wide range of patterns, symbols, and typefaces. I love a beautifully designed utilitarian object, so I photographed dozens of them, mostly in the cities of Garachico, La Laguna, and Santa Cruz. Here are a few favorites.

The fun in writing novels, for me, has often come from the tension between traditional forms, which for the most part I love, and the ideas I tend to get, which never really fit into the forms. As a reader, I’m always delighted when a clever writer takes a familiar kind of story and finds a way to break it and reassemble it; for this reason I’m drawn, in my reading, to the margins of genres, where people who clearly love the rules lovingly disobey them.

We publish because we are exhibitionists. We publish to be admired. We publish to be a part of something that excites us. We publish to feel special, to feel real, to feel brave, to feel afraid. We publish to evoke emotion in others, to prove Mom wrong. We publish because other people publish, and that’s what is done. We publish so that we can talk to other people who publish, about publishing. We publish so that we can get contributors’ copies, so that we can get a job, so that we can get laid. We publish for an excuse to go to New York, to have something to flog at conferences, to have something to brag about on airplanes. This is all commerce. Our cocktail party banter with other writers is commerce. Our blog posts about books we like, or loathe, are commerce. Our barroom readings and subtweets are commerce. We parlay our genetic predisposition to language, and our hard work developing it, into companionship, attention, admiration, criticism. This is normal, and we all do it.

As it turns out, the Cotton-Eye Joe dance is a staple of approximately everything. It isn’t just one dance, in fact; it’s a variety of them, elaborations on a 150-year-old clog dance that draw from a pool of simple moves, in much the way that Rednex is a musical group that draws from a pool of ridiculously-named artificial hillbillies. It can involve toe-taps and heel-taps, shoe-touches and sidesteps, grapevines and handclaps and knee bends. YouTube videos reveal variations that involve high kicks, hip shimmies, hat tips, full-body spins, and marching in place. There are line-dance versions and partner-dance versions. Variations on the Cotton-Eye Joe are performed by cheerleading squads, dance-competition preteens, seventh-inning stretchers, bedroom soliloquists, and newlyweds, and a great variety of old cartoons have been re-cut to appear purpose-made as accompaniments to the song.

SPECIMEN 10 was subjected to thorough scanning in an unnetworked computation cluster. It presents as a linear arrangement of 69,958,784 binary units, encoded in two parallel streams, with the possible purpose of inducing, via an unknown computational and electromechanical interface, variations in pitch, timbre, and amplitude perceivable by, and meaningful to, a biological entity of undetermined origin. The receiving entity is presumed to possess dual decrypting apparatus capable of perceiving the messages encoded within SPECIMEN 10.

No, yeah, no, I don’t think so, no

He was texting somebody from bed. Trying to hide it from her—it wasn’t clear who it was.

We’ve lost something, though: the particular look of particular writers’ work. One could tell, in the old days, who wrote what at merely a glance. So-and-so favored narrow margins and monospaced fonts. Such-and-such laid his stories out like book pages, with wide margins, Garamond variants, and page headings. When we read these manuscripts, we read them the way their writers intended. The emailing of word processor files, however, has left manuscripts open to changes—substituted fonts, altered formatting. And certain shortcomings that were once made manifest by printing now go unnoticed by writers, and only appear when classmates print.

This paper, made by Japan’s Tomoegawa Co., Ltd., is indisputably, unapologetically the shit. It is very thin, yet quite tough (I haven’t accidentally torn a page yet) and mind-bogglingly smooth. Its cream color is easy on the eye. It is most commonly found in the form of loose sheets and pads, and is great for letter writing. But Nanami has bound it into these journals, and they are amazing.

Are Professors Nelson and Underbridge playing footsie? They are sitting 14 feet apart. And yet it seems to be so.

Professor Gutierrez is delivering his remarks in French and everyone is pretending to understand.

Professor Van der Hoet keeps flickering in and out of view, like a distant rare deer seen through trees.

Edson’s work is about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, houses and theatres and furniture. He wrote about apes, pigs, cows and other animals. He wote about sex – as blunt, clumsy, ridiculous and faintly embarrassing. He wrote about eating, and never let you forget that what you eat, when you eat meat, is body parts, which he seemed to regard as darkly hilarious. He wrote about writing, as in this bit of sage advice from ‘Toward the Writing’: ‘If you wish to write something of value you will get yourself a mouse that has died of some dreadful disease.’

Marty, the guy you have to like because he’s always at the bar and is super friendly but you hate him, everyone does, he’s insufferable, but you can’t not like Marty, it’s a prerequisite for drinking here, but you want to kill him, we all do

You encounter your crush in a bar. She’s with friends. We were just talking about you, she says, and the friends laugh.