The Gulf Coast Blog

Craft • Culture • News

Craft • Culture • News

The Resonance of Objects: Thomas Derr's Telephone Road

Iain Morrisson

Telephone Road. Thomas Derr, Colgate University Press: Hamilton, 2012. There is something of a gap in contemporary Western literature in what might be called, after Camus, Sartre and perhaps Pirsig, the philosophical novel. Thomas Derr's Telephone Road…


All-Time, All-Star, All-Literature Football

David Tomas Martinez

Ever since I was five years old, September has meant the start not only of school, but also of football. In honor of this, I have created the All-Time, All-Star, All-Literature Football team. If I have cut your favorite player, let me know in the comments.…


First Poem, Best Poem

Layla Benitez-James

I find myself standing a little ways away from my lectern, staring off into space and picking at my lips with bitten-short fingernails. This happens every once in a while when I am working--I find that I unconsciously drift away physically from my workspace…


Looking at the Sunnyside of Life: Lessons from Southside

D'Lynn Barham

"Everyone has a personal story to tell." This is one of the core values of Writers in the Schools. Along with many other UH creative writing graduate students, I work for WITS, a non-profit organization that sends writers into classrooms across the Houston…


Pushing the Limits: Ceramic Arts Biennial

Erica Ciesielski Chaikin

From an overabundance of fruit (mixed with elegant china and random doll parts) to houses of "liberated" mugs, the 2013 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Biennial at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft has a little bit of everything.…


Three Tips For Breaking Someone's Heart With Your Nonfiction

Jameelah Lang

Over at The Kenyon Review, the editors have been running a stellar series on their blog called "Why We Chose It." And I admit: I've been stalking these posts. Not because the Kenyon Review's website looks so good (which it does), or because it includes…


An Art of Failure

Nancy K Pearson

Recently I had an "acoustic experience of terrestrial relief." The Art of Failure (the acoustic art website, not the band) recently featured a project called The Flat Earth Society, an acoustic experiment that allows you to hear the "hills and dales"…


Look But Don't Touch

Rachel Harmeyer

When you enter the galleries at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, a conspicuously placed sign immediately admonishes you not to touch the art. Frequent visitors to art museums might find such an edict superfluous; but at the HCCC right now, this…