A Hidden Writing Life
For the first time in my life, I have a room of my own in which to write. I also have the precious commodities of solitude and time.
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Women We Read This Week
Joanna Walsh’s “In Cyberspace: a love letter” in Granta Here is a thoroughly modern love story, largely enacted online, in “the place we all…
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The Antidote for Personal Narrative
A month from now, I will be a full-time kindergarten teacher. This was not part of the plan. The plan was… well, there wasn’t much of one…
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Women We Read This Week
Francesca Borri’s “Woman’s Work” in Columbia Journalism Review This CJR piece has been making the rounds this week. It’s by an Italian freelancer in…
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Women We Read This Week
Nicole Pasulka’s “Wanted: Macho Men With Moustaches” in The Believer I never spent a lot of time thinking about the cultural phenomenon of the…
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Information is the death of story
Boy, it sure looks dreamy over there on the fiction side of the genre line. No need to call back that source to find out the name of his first girlfriend…
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Between Bliss and Burnout
Our $17 room in Oaxaca had a soaring ceiling, easily thirty feet high, though lacking in that imposing baritone importance of high ceilings.
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The Writing Life, The Agonies of Process, and A New Year’s Resolution
Kurt Vonnegut wrote for two hours every morning: two hours of intense concentration, giving it his all, and done.
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The Art of Collaboration
When Vela started a year ago, pretty much the only rule that the six participating writers established was that the writing should somehow be about, or simply inspired by, travel.
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Making What?
It would have opened like this: the year 2000, June, weekday, mid-afternoon. Standing along the brick of 16th and Mission, a clump of dirty-haired kids…
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Fellowship and the Emerging Writer
Sitting in my half-packed office at Colgate, I gazed outside at the spring rain dampening the old stone buildings of that beautiful campus.
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You Want to Say No
There is an American flag flying outside the window, its dips and rises voluptuous as a luxury sedan on long slow curves.
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