Author Archives

Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

"She's been wearing a bra since fourth grade and I bet she gets her period." Great Dialogue from Great Writers

Nancy spoke to me as if she were my mother. “Margaret dear—you can’t possibly miss Laura Danker. The big blonde with the big you know whats!”

“Oh, I noticed her right off,” I said. “She’s very pretty.”

“Pretty!” Nancy snorted. “You be smart and stay away from her. She’s got a bad reputation.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“My brother said she goes behind the A&P with him and Moose.”

“And,” Janie added, “she’s been wearing a bra since fourth grade and I bet she gets her period.”

—Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, as quoted in Ten Authors Who Write Great Dialogue ( Meredith Borders, Lit Reactor). Borders’ column also features passages from Jeffrey Eugenides, Barbara Kingsolver and Elmore Leonard, among others.

Photo: New York Public Library, Flickr

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"Nothing crushes freedom as substantially as a tank." —Shirley Temple Black, Child Star and Diplomat

”It wasn’t until the next day that my guide came back and told me: ‘You will not see Mr. Dubcek, and you will not leave from the airport today. We have been invaded.’ There were tears in her eyes.”

”I was hungry, and on the way up to the roof of the hotel to try to see what was happening, I took some of the leftover hard rolls from the breakfast trays people had put outside their rooms,” she said. ”I looked down and saw tanks all around the hotel, and their guns were pointing up.

”That night, after curfew, in the lobby looking out at the street, I saw a Czech middle-aged woman shaking her fist at the soldiers. She was shot in the stomach and went down. That was a bad sight.”

”Nothing crushes freedom as substantially as a tank,” she observed. She was here for the subdued anniversary observances, marked by quiet demonstrations by a few thousand people and the police arrests of 350 of them.

—Craig R. Whitney interviewing Shirley Temple Black, the then newly minted US Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, about her experience in Prague in the late 1960’s (“Prague Journal; Shirley Temple Black Unpacks a Bag of Memories,” Sept. 11, 1989).

Photo: Boston Public Library, Flickr.

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In Her Own Words: Being Maxine Kumin

I was a closet poet always. I didn’t stop writing poetry just because Wallace Stegner told me I was a terrible poet. I went underground.

I had exempted English A at Harvard, which was a big mistake. Everybody should take it. They bucked me up to a high-level class in creative writing. It was all juniors and seniors, and I was the only freshman. I was 17 and Wallace Stegner was maybe all of 23 when I gave him a sheaf of poems. They were sonnets, all in iambic pentameter, but they were terribly sentimental and romantic. And he wrote at the top, “Say it with flowers, but for God sakes don’t write any more poems about it.”

After that, I was writing serious poems in the closet, but I was writing light verse for the slicks. For $3.95 I bought this book by Richard Armour called Writing Light Verse. I took it all very seriously, and by golly I started selling all over the place – Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Baby Talk, New York Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, even the Wall Street Journal. I learned some things writing light verse. I learned how important closure is, and that has guided me ever since.

Maxine Kumin (1925-2014), as quoted in the Concord Monitor. Kumin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973 and  served as the United States Poet Laureate from 1981-1982. She passed away Thursday, at the age of 88. Some of Kumin’s work can be found at the Poetry Foundation. For further reading from the Longreads archive: 5 Great Stories on the Lives of the Poets.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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What It's Like To Work As an Abortion Provider in the Town Where Dr. George Tiller Was Shot

“I had a sinking feeling when I opened the letter and saw who the sender was,” Dr. Chastine recounted to me over email. “These were the same people who’d just mounted a full scale campaign to make my professional life unpleasant. I couldn’t help but take it as an announcement: We know where you live. You’re not safe anywhere.”

—Robin Marty, writing about Dr. Cheryl Chastine for Think Progress. Read more about abortion in the Longreads archives.

Photo: Gary P Kurns, Flickr

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Charlie Chaplin's Lost Novel

“What happened?”

“A nervous breakdown. I almost died.”

“And you’re still drinking?”

“Occasionally, when I think of things.” He smiled, “The wrong things, I suppose. However, I’ve talked enough about myself. What would you like for breakfast?”

“What a sad business, being funny,” she said thoughtfully.

The table was laid and now he was ready to cook breakfast. He stood a moment, deep in thought. “But it has its compensations … It’s a great thrill to hear an audience laugh. Now let me see,” he said, opening the door of the larder, “We have eggs, salmon, sardines … ” He snapped his fingers. “That’s broken my dream! I dreamt we were doing an act together! That’s the trouble, I get wonderful ideas in my dreams, but when I awake, I forget them. This morning I found myself shaking with laughter. Then I got up and rushed to the desk and wrote five pages of screams. Then I awoke and found I hadn’t written a line.”

From Charlie Chaplin’s novel, Footlights, excerpted in the Guardian. At just over 30,000 words, it’s the only work of fiction ever written by Chaplin, and it traces the same narrative as his film Limelight. The work was in Chaplin’s archives for decades, and is now being published by the Cineteca di Bologna and will be available on both Amazon and the publisher’s website. Read more about Chaplin in the Longreads Archive.

Too Poor for Pop Culture?

“What the fuck is a selfie?” said Miss Sheryl.

“When a stupid person with a smartphone flicks themselves and looks at it,” I said to the room. She replied with a raised eyebrow, “Oh?”

It’s amazing how the news seems so instant to most from my generation with our iPhones, Wi-Fi, tablets and iPads, but actually it isn’t. The idea of information being class-based as well became evident to me when I watched my friends talk about a weeks-old story as if it happened yesterday.

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Miss Sheryl doesn’t have a computer and definitely wouldn’t know what a selfie is. Her cell runs on minutes and doesn’t have a camera. Like many of us, she’s too poor to participate in pop culture. She’s on public assistance living in public housing and scrambles for odd jobs to survive.

D. Watkins, writing in Salon, on how class differences influence the consumption of pop culture. Read more from Salon in the Longreads archive.

Photo: Urban Feel, Flickr

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Russell Brand on What It’s Like to Be an Addict

Drugs and alcohol are not my problem, reality is my problem, drugs and alcohol are my solution.

If this seems odd to you it is because you are not an alcoholic or a drug addict. You are likely one of the 90% of people who can drink and use drugs safely. I have friends who can smoke weed, swill gin, even do crack and then merrily get on with their lives. For me, this is not an option. I will relinquish all else to ride that buzz to oblivion. Even if it began as a timid glass of chardonnay on a ponce’s yacht, it would end with me necking the bottle, swimming to shore and sprinting to Bethnal Green in search of a crack house. I look to drugs and booze to fill up a hole in me; unchecked, the call of the wild is too strong. I still survey streets for signs of the subterranean escapes that used to provide my sanctuary. I still eye the shuffling subclass of junkies and dealers, invisibly gliding between doorways through the gutters. I see that dereliction can survive in opulence; the abundantly wealthy with destitution in their stare.

—Comedian and actor Russell Brand, writing in The Guardian  in 2013. His essay explores his past as a heroin addict, and how he has stayed sober for the past 10 years.

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Why Hollywood Will Never Look the Same Again on Film

After Michael Mann set out to direct Collateral, the story’s setting moved from New York to Los Angeles. This decision was in part motivated by the unique visual presence of the city — especially the way it looked at night. Mann shot a majority of the film in HD (this was 2004), feeling the format better captured the city’s night lighting. Even the film’s protagonist taxi needed a custom coat to pick up different sheens depending on the type of artificial lighting the cab passed beneath. That city, at least as it appears in Collateral and countless other films, will never be the same again. L.A. has made a vast change-over to LED street lights, with New York City not far behind…Mann chose to shoot HD because of how the format rendered the story’s setting. Considering that Collateral takes place over the course of a single night, its portrayal of LA’s nocturnal landscape is integral to the film. Due to the city’s recent retrofit of over 140,000 street lights, that nocturnal landscape has changed forever.

Dave Kendricken, writing at NoFilmSchool, on how the city of Los Angeles’s decision to switch to LED lighting will forever alter the way its streets appear on film.

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What Happens When Ronan Farrow Interviews Miley Cyrus

Beyond music, Cyrus is expanding her interests. After her breakup, she tells me, she asked Diane Martel, the director responsible for Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” videos, to “just completely, like, drown me in new movies and books and art. I lived in Nashville, where that shit isn’t accessible.” We flip through a book of photographs by Cindy Sherman. “Check it,” she says as we arrive at Sherman’s Untitled #276, in which the artist poses as a kind of grungy Cinderella. “Lady Gaga completely ripped that off.” Cyrus is finding her taste in movies, too. She tells me she just watched the Tom Cruise 1990 drama Days of Thunder three nights in a row. She’s also newly enamored with the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. “I’m Blanche to a T, complete psycho,” she burbles cheerfully. I stare at her. I literally cannot imagine anyone less like Tennessee Williams’s fragile, lost Blanche DuBois. “Every time I watched her,” she goes on, “I was always like, ‘That’s me!’ ” If Cyrus is a Vivien Leigh performance, it’s Scarlett O’Hara in the early scenes of Gone With the Wind. She’s impetuous, beautiful, smarter than many give her credit for, slow to listen, quick to talk, adept at using her sexuality to her own ends. As for the world beyond the arts, Cyrus is leery.

—Ronan Farrow, on Miley Cyrus in W Magazine.  Read more profiles in the Longreads archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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From the Garden of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll to the Yale English Department

You couldn’t see Skull and Bones from the seminar room in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, though it was directly across the street. But the building was much on my mind the afternoon of the reception and had been from the day I got to New Haven. To my 26-year-old self, it seemed nearly impossible that literature—Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Whitman—was sharing space with Skull and Bones. I did not know much about Bones, but I took it to be a bastion of reactionary America. The society reached out its withered hand to tap future Wall Street pirates, CIA agents, and the sort of State Department operatives who had leveraged us into Vietnam, where a number of my high-school buddies had gone to be maimed and worse.

At least the Skull and Bones building looked its part. They called it the Crypt—and it did look like it was designed by Edgar Allan Poe. It was all stone and metal, with no real windows, and doors of enormous weight. Those doors must have closed with the grimmest finality, though never in my five New Haven years did I see them open or shut.

Mark Edmundson, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on his time at the Yale English department in the late 1970s. Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education in the Longreads archive. 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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