Columns
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Writing the Shit Out of Your Darlings: A Conversation with Ramona Ausubel
“Thinking about the way a river moves while thinking about plot is really helpful, for example. It’s not a straight line. The same way an early draft doesn’t go from page one effortlessly and straightforwardly to page two-hundred and fifty.…
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National Poetry Month: “DRAB AS A F OOL, AS A LOOF AS A BARD”
Don’t nod, borrow or rob. Live not on evil,
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The Grand Performance of Womanhood: A Conversation with Caro Claire Burke
“A lot of the experience of writing a novel was not unfamiliar to me. And I think, at least for me, so much of writing is just figuring out mental tricks to stick with it, because so much of it…
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National Poetry Month: Magdalena
Magdalena was shaping small pools of water in pockets of stone. A bare-faced ibis sounded his quintuplet alarm when you turned to me to say you’d stopped the medications one month ago. The head pain, back pain, tremors, the cytomegalovirus—too…
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Infestation
Everyone knew the housing projects had rats, but when Liliya first saw one she was lying on her mattress on the floor, looking at her phone until a sudden, furtive movement caught her eye. The rat was only a few…
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The First Book: Avery Curran
“For me, writing a first novel was defined by having to accept that I was learning how to do it as I went, and that is a very disagreeable experience if you, like me, are one of the world’s great…
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National Poetry Month: Two Poems
so that the sounds of daily living become a part of the ritual as public as private as life but also so that when I sit in the dark on the couch paying the bills my face illuminated by the…
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The Age of Nightmares
My son’s voice came through on the monitor. I waited a second, eyes closed, not losing hope he’d fall back asleep, even though that hardly ever happens. He’s two years old; they say it’s the age of nightmares. Almost every…
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National Poetry Month: Two Poems
in a woodstove. Some warmth returns to my life, some looking-after feeling, some protective force for what is tender, vulnerable and lost in me until now. What a joy
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To Insist on Loving and on Being Loved: A Conversation with Camille T. Dungy
“ I was writing poems all the while but writing poems and making a book are different matters altogether. The real question is what it took for me to organize these poems into a collection that held the energy I…
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Horror as a Crucible for Connection in Zefyr Lisowski’s “Uncanny Valley Girls”
Horror is a genre of solitude
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National Poetry Month: A Day in the Life
I paid my friends to step on their hands with stilettos The gift of stigmata