“That’s my middle-west”: Nick Carraway’s Christmas Memories

One of my all time favorite passages from The Great Gatsby concerns Christmas and the Midwest. The passage comes towards the end of the novel as Nick Carraway is describing the aftermath of Gatsby’s murder and preparing to leave New York. There’s something about this passage that captures that exhilaration of returning home for the…

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Daunted by NaNoWriMo? Try “NaNovellaWriMo” instead

The month-long frenzy of novel writing called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is soon to begin. This has become a phenomenon in recent years, an event complete with not only the requisite website, but also support systems, group writing sessions, merchandise, and so on. The goal is to produce, if not a finished first draft…

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