Jessica Barksdale Inclan

200 Followers

Why Not Compare?

My favorite part about the 1989 film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is the motley crew of historical figures the boys pick up for…

Mar 4, 2021

Being Civil

Mar 3, 2021

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How A Writing Assignment Turned Into a Sex Talk

Every semester — save for those during the pandemic — I ask my students to go out into the world to hear a writer who is working on the…

Feb 26, 2021

Time Warp Party

When I was little, I believed that adults did very certain things depending on their gender, not that I knew what gender meant at the time…

Feb 22, 2021

Making Coffee, Writing Novels

People who haven’t had coffee shouldn’t make coffee.

Feb 19, 2021

As a student and then as a teacher, I’ve had some rough times figuring out when to stop or start…

Don’t know your Virgil? Alas! Can’t read Chaucer in the original Middle English? Be damned. But class after class, we were given a mixture…

Feb 17, 2021

What About a Little Conflict?

Conflict

Feb 17, 2021

Putting Together a Poetry Collection

One of my friends recently asked me how to put a poetry collection together. I told her I would think about it and get back to her.

Feb 12, 2021

Reimagining Shakespeare

As a reader from the get-go, an English major even before I knew I was, I always had my idea of what William Shakespeare looked like, kind…

Feb 5, 2021

Feb 5, 2021

How to Create Chapters

When I set about writing my first novel, Her Daughter’s Eyes, I was truly unsure how to craft a chapter. What was a chapter, exactly? I…

Jan 29, 2021

Jan 29, 2021

Writing Prompts for the Pandemic

She began to wash her groceries, even the cardboard boxes, even the lettuce, even the cheese.

Mar 28, 2020

What a Show

There are a lot of things people never really explain to women in their fifties. Or the explanation is about the size of the fine print on…

Jan 6, 2020

Jan 6, 2020

When Novels Are Better

Spoilers for Season Eight, Game of Thrones. All of them.

May 20, 2019

May 20, 2019

Walking Maslow’s PyramidBackward

I first learned about Maslow and his hierarchy of needs during my undergraduate years. Even then, I thought he made some good points…

Mar 28, 2019

Mar 28, 2019

Dreaming in Italian

The setting is dark, the walls high, cool to the touch. One, maybe two lights burn somewhere. The people are slightly sepia toned…

Feb 19, 2019

Feb 19, 2019

I Should Have Known

Of course, I really wanted my novel The Burning Hour to be published. It’s a good story, one that should be told. But it’s not exactly…

Jan 27, 2019

Learning Italian, Learning Anything

Language of late has seemed like a box, a very small one. In fact, it’s like a small room into which I have been thrown with a couple of…

Jan 27, 2019

Moving On

I finally got around to Sunday’s NYT’s piece by Jada Yuan, the reporter who traveled the world and visited 52 places and lived to write…

Jan 9, 2019

Don’t Worry About the Details

A therapist friend of mine once said that when her practice grew smaller, people leaving the hard work of being whole and moving on to…

Jun 20, 2017

What I’d Tell Her

Somehow I got through the election and all the writing about being abused and assaulted by men without remembering the time a boy tried to…

Jun 17, 2017