Category: Writing

“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.

A woman out of her mind, locked in an apartment. This, I believed, was the optimal, and probably only, condition under which art could be made.

The author learned how to tell stories from her psychic mother.

Joan Morgan’s “She Begat This” looks back at how Lauryn Hill crashed through hip-hop’s glass ceiling, while our critic looks at how the author and a cadre of black women writers did the same for hip-hop music journalism.

“When I write, I’m creating a character, and then I’m just performing that character, and typing what they say.”

How Jami Attenberg helped form a supportive online literary community with #1000WordsofSummer.

A new essay and podcast series examines how attitudes toward age and aging have changed.

While striving to become a travel writer in the years after Watergate, Thomas Swick discovered that although writing for a newspaper was educational, there was more to be learned through romance with a foreigner.

It was the place he came to feel wild, and I was ready to trespass into the world of men.

Is it possible to be queer, lefty, and a Latter-Day Saint? After leaving the church, Sarah Scoles sets out to understand liberal Mormons.

After publishing her first book, Lauren Markham begins the long search for what she truly wanted after writing it.

Does each of your children represent a novel you’ll never write? Michael Chabon is okay with that.

Largely unknown, Julia de Burgos may have been Puerto Rico’s greatest poet.

On Didion, Arendt, Malcolm, Ephron and other women writers who made an art of having an opinion.

A conversation between writers Eva Holland, Benjamin Percy, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Mary H.K. Choi, and Adam Sternbergh about writing on both sides of the fiction-nonfiction divide.

When Anthony Ray Hinton was sentenced to death for two murders he didn’t commit, he used his time to create a book club for death row inmates.

One month after her father was arrested, Neda Semnani and her family were taken on a dangerous journey to be smuggled out of Iran.

Amy Long on how it feels to fight for the man you don’t want.

When Leslie Jamison got sober she wanted to know how a life lived without alcohol would affect her writing.

On showing, telling, and finding one’s way as a literary writer of color.

Mom would make excuses about not having cleaned the house. I knew they were lies. I knew her house was full.

A conversation about writing novels that have roots in reality.

Angela Palm learns to find joy in a world filled with suffering.

Barbara Ehrenreich on thinking as an antidote to “the unknown and potentially menacing.”