The Writing Life

OutlinesSeptember 17, 2015

Truth and Lies: An Interview with Janice Erlbaum

By Eryn Loeb

When Villard Books, a Random House imprint, published Janice Erlbaum’s second memoir, Have You Found Her (2008), Vanity Fair threw her a party at…

The Writing Life, UncategorizedAugust 19, 2015

The Edge of Extraordinary

By Amanda Giracca

I am nearing the end of my first writerly—read, sedentary—summer ever.

The Writing LifeAugust 4, 2015

I have come home again, to Arkansas, to sink down my roots into the only home I have ever known. My mom has dug rocks out of the hard Arkansas soil, planted sweet peas, basil, hollyhocks, marigolds, and distributed loads of manure over the garden—slowly she expands her territory.

The Writing LifeJuly 30, 2015

Writing Like a Mother(f*cker)

By Sarah Menkedick

In the first few months after the baby is born, I experience a singing clarity: Milk! Diapers! Milk! Diapers! Lusty oxytocin! Sleep! Cheez-it binge! Sleep! I have cleared out a space–no, cleared out my whole brain–for this time, and I have no expectation of writing.

The Writing LifeMarch 12, 2015

My Own Trap

By Alice Driver

Two years ago, when I was living in Mexico City in a rented room that faced a noisy gas station and made me an insomniac for the first time in my life, I got the news that my book, More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico, would be published.

The Writing LifeAugust 4, 2014

Emergency Pot Cookie

By Laura Goode

If you are ever nineteen and living in San Francisco for the first time, working at your first writing job, getting paid, getting laid, carousing 24/7…