Eric McHenry’s essays and criticism appear in The North American Review, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, New Letters, and The Baffler, and regularly in The American Scholar. His poetry has received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Prize and has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Agni, and the TLS. He teaches English at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, and was the poet laureate of Kansas from 2015–2017.
Manuscript Consulting at Bear River:
I’ll come to our consultation with a head full of ideas, but I’ll ask you to speak first; I want your aspirations for your manuscript-in-progress to guide our conversation about it. In the words of A.E. Housman, “How shall I help you, say.” Subjects that I never tire of discussing include: how poems can complement, complicate, amplify, undergird, or overwhelm other poems; how a poet’s voice distinguishes itself from other voices; how fidelity to fact, in nonfiction, can be as creatively liberating as artistic license; and how pacing and precision are the nonfiction writer’s hammer and chisel.
