Category: Writing

Melissa Matthewson remembers the flights of fancy that kept her company as a young girl, and bears witness to her daughter’s.

Even with the federal government in chaos, there’s still plenty of opportunity to solve a global problem.

Edited by Toni Morrison, the 1983 novel ‘Fish Tales’ by Nettie Jones was supposed to set the literary world on fire. It didn’t.

Diagnosed with breast cancer, Anne Boyer discusses the treatment that is poisoning her body.

Margot Harris grapples with guilt following a labiaplasty procedure.

Vanessa Mártir introduces Writing the Mother Wound, a series of essays on mothering presented in collaboration with Writing our Lives and Longreads.

In “Coventry,” Rachel Cusk draws a connection between politeness and narrative death, rudeness and tragedy, storytelling and war.

In her debut memoir, Sarah Broom builds her “obsession” with her family home — destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina — into a story of how families decide who they are, how they got here, and how they reconstruct themselves over and over again.

Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestseller is deeply rooted in a specific, Gen-X cultural moment. Can it still speak to us in 2019?

Writing about the culture and beauty of the Mississippi Delta requires seeing the mighty river as more than a line of water.

Bassey Ikpi discusses writing about mental illness. “I could count on the morning. It became the thing that existed without my input… without determining whether or not I was worthy of it.”

Our inherited biases about who should write what live deeper than most of us realize or want to acknowledge.

The editors of “Shapes of Native Nonfiction” talk about the craft of writing, the politics of metaphor, and resisting the exploitation of trauma.

In this reading list, Jeanne Bonner ruminates on the joys of writing by hand and keeping a notebook.

Journalism now is a lot more fear and insecurity and a lot less corduroy and Robert Redford, but you’d never know it from what is projected.

White people: how many people still think “Fabio!” when they hear “romance novel,” raise your hands. Thought so.

While envisioning the darkest of futures and grappling with mortality, the English writer retreated to an idyllic Scottish isle to write Nineteen Eighty-Four.

More of this sort of thing, thanks.

“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”

“I wasn’t interested in writing the definitive book on A Tribe Called Quest. I was trying to write the definitive book on a single arc of fandom.”

When Ijeoma Oluo offers to buy her aging white mother a home, her mother worries she’s become a burden.

Ann Leckie talks about “The Raven Tower,” the erasure of women writers from the canon, the privilege inherent to ‘the anxiety of influence,’ and the power of tradition.

An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape.

“It’s difficult to say what you really think. You’re too aware of the traps, the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs of utterance: all the ways we let cliché steer us in a certain direction, force us to say not quite what we mean…”

Tessa Hadley on gaining the sense of authority she needed to write fiction, the authors whose work opens the door for her to write, and the way we are formed by our connections with other people.

Sarah Moss’s tale of Iron Age reenactors and parental abuse is her way of addressing Brexit. “Putting the skulls of the ancestors up in some attempt to hold back history never works.”

For author Jaclyn Gilbert, revising her writing is much like doing the same running loops over and over, to the point where she doesn’t have to think about where she’s going anymore.

“Heavy” confronts generations of Black art.

Barbara Kingsolver takes a rigorous, scientific approach to her novels’ subjects — but, as a woman writer, her authority is often challenged.

Memoirist Tanya Marquardt talks about consent, trauma, and investigating our memories in the age of #MeToo.