We had Robert Kloss and Amber Sparks at the school this week to do a reading from The Desert Places, which was brilliant beyond all imagining.



The little 87-page novella (illustrated by Matt Kish, you all remember his illustrations of Moby Dick, right?) is packed with some of the most beautiful text I've read in what feels like ages. Kloss, who writes exclusively in the second person (see his book, Alligators of Abraham) and Sparks, whose flash fiction May We Shed These Human Bodies (now printed in a collection of the same name) has claimed the title of my most favorite short story of the year, pushing out even Brittany Harmon's Haunting in B Minor, spent time with some of the creative writing majors as part of a class focused around the senses, and remembering to use something other than vision, once in a while. It was both enlightening and nerve-wracking.

It's always inspiring and intimidating and humbling to have writers come to our classroom and talk to us on a level we don't struggle to comprehend. Sometimes I feel that authors talk over the heads of others who haven't been in the craft as long and while I don't like to say that we, as students hold them down I also don't feel that we lift them up onto pedestals, either.

Authors like all artists are people, and being able to speak with them about the creative process on a casual level is infinitely invaluable. The reminder that writers are people is always nice too because lets face it: we all want to believe ourselves to be superhuman, above the expectations of the standards we hold other people to.

Or maybe that's just me.