I was driving by a restaurant I'd been meaning to try (Julia's Bistro? Sheba? The Breakfast Club?) when a pothole jostled my car and brain. Houston is known for its potholes. Recovering from the jolt, I found myself thinking of a professor at the University…

This week it's Thanksgiving and like any other sap in the country, I can't help but muse about all the wonderful and touching things that I've come across in my life. As a writer, one of these wonderful things is (and always has been) reading. I can't…

A few weeks ago, I was in New York for a wedding and I stopped by the apartment of a former professor of mine to catch up. We talked for a while about what he was teaching, the students in his workshop, Houston, the election, and he read me one of his…

A recent article in New York Magazine describes Full Fathom Five, a project created and headed by James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces and a couple novels. The article is written by a young writer who almost became one of more than a dozen in…

I've been thinking about influence lately. And perhaps partly because of a couple recent posts on this blog, I've been thinking about influence in the context of gender. Not too long ago I was in workshop and we were discussing a published book by a female…

Perhaps like many others, I grew up listening to the music of my parents. There were, of course, some minor deviations--I clearly remember listening to a popular song by the Filipino rapper, Andrew E, and dialing (and redialing) the phone number he sung…

My name, David Tomas Martinez, is the Mexican equivalent of John Smith, and like many of my friends, I played sports growing up. In my neighborhood, running the football got dances with the prettiest girls, and being able to fight was an apotrope to black…

Maybe it's because I've been watching too much Jersey Shore, but lately I've been thinking about the world in terms of manliness. Don't you judge me. On Jersey Shore, the guidos try to figure out who is the manliest and sexiest through a series of manly…

For the past year or so, The Paris Review Interviews has been hanging out in my Amazon shpping cart, but at $40, the price of the four-volume boxed set was a little too steep for my graduate school budget. So I was delighted to read in a recent New York…