What is literature?

An English professor's notes on airports, writing, & fly-fishing

Tuesday, January 6, 2026

The End of Airports is Nigh

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Tomi Um's illustration in The New Yorker I enjoyed Zach Helfand’s nauseating jaunt in the New Yorker  through airport lounges (“ The Lou...
Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Object Lessons Impressions

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Object Lessons Impressions are 500-word essayettes on the hidden lives of ordinary things, published in collaboration with the Pittsburgh R...
Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Four book reviews

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My work these days has primarily involved helping others on their own projects: supporting books, essays, and all sorts of public-facing thi...
Sunday, January 28, 2024

Little Data

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For Spring 2024,  a new book :  Little Data , which I wrote with my great friend and longtime collaborator Mark Yakich .   
Thursday, December 21, 2023

Recent book news

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A minnow-pattern fly tied by my friend Glen up in Michigan. I'm showing it to one of my Loyola students, Morgan. Photo by Kyle Encar. My...
Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Big Move, New Project

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I've been busy this summer: We moved 650 miles up the Mississippi River, where I've taken a new job as Director of Public Scholarshi...
Friday, April 14, 2023

Adventure

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  New book coming August 2023! 
Sunday, January 1, 2023

Three new pieces

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I keep thinking about this ad that circulated for months online, last year: it's for a cozy clothes line, like pajamas and sweats, but s...
Saturday, December 10, 2022

Two new essays...in print magazines

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I didn't set out to be so retro this year, but I have two new essays out this month in print magazines. (Just in print, not online!)  I ...
Sunday, November 27, 2022

Creative Nonfiction

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I reviewed Chris Dombrowski's moving new book The River You Touch for The FlyFish Journal . This book got me thinking again about the cu...
Friday, October 14, 2022

Invasive fish & us

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  Rio Grande Cichlid, Bayou St. John, MidCity New Orleans I enjoyed D.T. Max’s recent New Yorker article on lionfish and the spearfishing ...
Monday, September 19, 2022

Environmental Memoir Undone

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An Alice Marwick concept that she made for my next book's cover; we didn't end up using this image, but I like it a lot. I wrote ab...
Thursday, May 19, 2022

Fly-fishing as practice

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  My buddy Brian with a beautiful bluegill caught at Bayou St. John I wrote a brief review of Dylan Tomine's new book Headwaters , for T...
Tuesday, May 17, 2022

No More Twitter

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Han in carbonite, about the same dimensions as my iPhone SE I got off Twitter last month, and wrote a bit about why  for Inside Higher Ed . ...
Friday, February 18, 2022

Editing & Publishing

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The most recent Object Lessons poster Part of my job these days involves directing the new Center for Editing & Publishing at Loyola. T...
Sunday, December 12, 2021

Blue tarps, and other fall recaps

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It's been an exhausting semester, by turns a slog and a whirlwind (literally, at times). On a recent visit to my kids' doctor's ...
Monday, October 11, 2021

Space Travel is a Look

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Having fled the blackout that left our city dark in the wake of Hurricane Ida, we found ourselves in a Courtside Marriott near the Memphis a...
Saturday, September 25, 2021

Ecological Thoughts

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  Hurricane Ida reconfigured the willow tree in our backyard, titling it about 15 degrees to the left of where it used to stand. As a result...
Sunday, September 5, 2021

Hurricane Ida

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  Hurricane Ida right before we lost power I wrote three pieces at Medium about my experience of Hurricane Ida: before , during , and after ...
Friday, May 28, 2021

Spacefaring, Quarantine, Air Travel

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Aspirational rendering of Mars base, (c) SpaceX I've been thinking a lot about the narratives and fantasies that fuel space travel, and ...
Saturday, May 8, 2021

Recent writings

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  Julien riding his bike up in Michigan   I wrote about teaching my kids to ride bicycles during quarantine, for Transformations .  I wrote ...
Saturday, April 3, 2021

Colonizing Mars

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  This is not Mars. This is bread. I wrote about how we're already colonizing Mars , for Slate 's Future Tense series.  Here are two...
Monday, November 30, 2020

Pedagogy of the Depressed

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When I thought of the title for my next book , I figured that it must have been done already. It was too obvious: a contemporary pun on Pau...
Thursday, September 10, 2020

Hygiene Class (& other speculations)

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Hygiene  Class starts with  Hygiene  Air... I had a good chat with travel writer Andrew Nelson about the future of flight, for a listicle he...
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Christopher Schaberg
Director of Public Scholarship Washington University in St. Louis
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