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... more
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.
An interview with the author of the forthcoming White Dancing Elephants.
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... more
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... more
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... more
Roxane Gay took me out to dinner five years ago. It was Roxane, Ashley C. Ford and me. We were in... more
Southerners think that West Virginia is the north, and northerners think West Virginia is the south.
The term “unreliable narrator” was first coined in 1961 by the critic Wayne C. Booth, and since then it has become... more
The book reveals as much about the reader’s psyche, about the self and the readers’ reaction to reading it, as it does about the author— this deeply personal thing, a dream, so full of symbols we imbue with our own shared and cultural meanings.
"I didn't want to ever be outside of this moment. I knew at some point I would look at the picture I'd just taken and feel an overwhelming sense of loss. I thought as long as we could manage to stay inside this particular hotel room, to avoid our phones and every person with whom we'd ever come into contact, we would continue to feel whole. We were revolutionaries, goddamnit. These were our accumulation of beautiful moments. Before the world fractured us. I don't expect you to understand how I became Brad Pitt in that moment, how we all just flew along down the highway. Bandits. Ex-patriots. In love with this countryside, if not this country. Paper Moon. The Last Picture Show. All of this shot in black and white. Only the final scene in color."
FOUR NEW ESSAYS BY CHLOE CALDWELL! Plus the original essays that made you fall in love with Chloe!
Jason Phoebe Rusch is a queer writer from the Chicago suburbs. His full-length debut Dualities explores gender and patriarchy from the perspective of a man who was socialized and is currently still read as a woman. He is interested in complication and nuance and messy human failing, his own and that of others.
