When I was younger, if you had a hard time following rules, you became an artist.

Now, if you have a hard time following rules, you become an entrepreneur.

People in the literary world follow rules the most.

"Honestly, I don't care if language overtakes story." 

Maybe ‘white trash American girl’ is a compliment over there?

If you were to sit down and watch an American beer commercial and then a Canadian one, they wouldn't be that different. Replace the eagle with a beaver. 

Trent, and NIN, are way cooler and better. Also Trent is fucking hot.

The wonderful thing about teenagers — which is what he is now — is that they are very focused on their own lives and not the least bit interested in what their parents are up to.

The great thing about Betty and Rosalynn Carter working together was showing the world how to find common ground even when coming from different political stances. We could use a lot more of that right now.

Eva Hagberg Fisher's forthcoming book (out next week) How To Be Loved figuratively fell in my lap. I was at coffee with a friend, saying I needed a new book to read, but I needed that book to be about recovery because I just needed to be heard and understood, and lo and behold, my inbox pinged.

Leah Dieterich:’s Vanishing Twins A Marriage came onto my radar when I saw it described as a Barthes-like book of fragments about an open marriage. As I read it, I discovered that it’s a book about

I don’t feel like I’m very good at writing a serious story with super realistic violence and human emotion. I feel like it has to be filtered through some kind of absurd or weird lens. 

Two writers in conversation.

"I’m always looking for ways to pay more attention. I thought maybe I could be a better writer if I knew what private investigators knew, if I could see a clue for what it was. I’m still learning."  

Every writer knows the rule of ‘write what you know,’ but the interesting thing is that you don’t really know what you know until you write it.

I based the Australian on a man I met in a coffee shop when I was 19. We went back to his place and did coke together, and he told me all about himself...

It's work that I want to do, and then sometimes it's just fun, and then sometimes it's a pain in the ass.

I think the dominator model will always exist in each person, just like each person has partnership qualities. After learning more about history, it does seem to me now that humans are in a process, however inconsistent and drawn-out, of recovering from extreme sexism—which reached absurd levels when people started promoting Yahweh ~3500 years ago, culminating maybe with Christianity around the first century—over millennia.

If I could purchase a lifetime subscription to a living author’s work, I’d subscribe to John McNally. His fiction is engaging and funny, his books on craft are illuminating, and his recent memoir—The

Kentucky is chill and for the most part, doesn't try to be something it's not. I feel that way abt myself tbh.

When I was twelve or thirteen my grandmother gave me a book by art historian and occultist Fred Gettings about the tarot. My grandmother really helped foster my imagination about magic.

Most of the time, I am skeptical of the notion that a writer can find his or her voice.  I warn my first-year students against believing the maxim because, to me, it presupposes that every writer

An interview with Anna Noyes

For instance, I had the line “But I was talking about lightning” in my head for the first line of an essay, but I had no idea what that essay was about. So I started to write about lightning and do some Wikipedia-ing, and eventually the idea of looking at trauma and human relationships through the metaphor of lightning started to emerge. From there, I just followed my brain around as the essay started to form.

Thank you for calling that curiosity “innocent.”  I like the sense of “innocent" as “guileless,” rather than “not-guilty,” since the poems sketch both our ignorance and our complicity.  I

Toronto-based writer Sennah Yee’s first collection, How Do I Look?, is quick-witted, lucid, observant and constantly rewarding. Though her book is technically classified as poetry, her pieces feel more like vignettes to me, mini-stories and personal anecdotes that seem to be examining their feelings in real time, tackling in the process a wide range of topics such as mythological figures, the movie Mulan, The Sims, sexual awakenings, microaggressions, Grand Theft Auto 5, being Chinese-Canadian and much more.

Introductions are stupid. Mostly they get in the way. Probably you have skipped ahead to read the actual interview. That's what I would have done by now. If you're still here, this is what you need