Burke Nixon

Oct 14, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Burke Nixon |Peter Quinn |George Scialabba

The first time I ever heard John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery,” I thought it was ridiculous. I couldn’t get past the song’s opening lines: “I am an old woman / named after my mother.” Prine, who’d been a Chicago-area postal worker before taking up music full time, was in his mid-twenties when he wrote and recorded that now-classic song for his 1971 debut. Hearing him sing those opening lines on the classic-rock station years ago, all I could think was: This guy sounds nothing like an old woman.

May 15, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Burke Nixon |Thomas Geoghegan |Beverly Willett |Sharon Mesmer

Every few years, from childhood until my late teens, my granddad would take me along with him to the small Texas town where he grew up—Normangee, population 522—to visit old relatives and even older graves. The drive took us up I-45, beyond the Houston sprawl, past pine forests, and eventually through Huntsville, epicenter of the state prison system.

Apr 18, 2024 | southwestreview.com | Burke Nixon |Robert Rea

By Burke NixonIn the early stages of reading Clemens Meyer’s While We Were Dreaming—the first fifty pages, let’s say—I couldn’t remember the title. A buddy of mine asked me what I’d been reading lately, and I told him I was reading this long German novel about a group of juvenile delinquent friends (or maybe I just said “a group of adolescent boys”) in East Germany around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Jan 2, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Burke Nixon |Gareth Dale |Alice McDermott |Phil Christman

The essays of Montaigne aren’t the easiest sell in the twenty-first century. The French nobleman wrote 107 of them, all composed in the final decades of the sixteenth century, totaling nearly nine hundred pages in the bulky English edition resting right now on my kitchen table. Most of them are rambling and digressive, nearly all of them full of obscure historical and philosophical allusions that would try the attention span of even a moderately-online citizen.

Oct 28, 2023 | commonwealmagazine.org | Burke Nixon |Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly

In 1899, at the height of his fame, Anton Chekhov offered his elder brother Alexander some writing advice: “To have as few failures as possible in fiction writing, or in order not to be so sensitive to failures, you must write more, around one hundred or two hundred stories a year. That is the secret.” One can only imagine how Alexander received this counsel from his celebrated younger sibling.