Poets & Writers

For one young writer, author events provided the guidance and humanity he needed to help craft his literary life.

All libraries are unique, but a writer’s books give a very personal look at their personality, their peculiarities, influences, and memories.

An essay by memoirist Melissa Febos in which she responds to her Sarah Lawrence students’ fears around writing about their traumas, and concerns about being accused of “navel gazing.” She rejects the notion that there are already too many stories about trauma and personal experiences out there–along with other notions about memoir as narcissistic, arguments she believes are designed to silence women. “It is not gauche to write about trauma,” she writes. “It is subversive.”

Almond argues that a culture of negativity is growing in the world of writers, partly due to a fear that they are competing for fewer steady jobs and a shrinking audience. “Entitlement is the enemy of artistic progress, which requires patience and gratitude and, above all, humility. You don’t grow as a writer by writing off other people’s efforts. You grow as a writer by respecting the process.”

On storytelling, and the questions it answers in our own lives:

“Around the time our daughter turned four, she started making what seemed like odd requests. ‘Tell me about the sad parts of your life,’ she would say at the dinner table. Or, ‘Tell me about the scary parts of your life.’”

This phase went on for a while. I played along, telling her about my appendectomy in Africa, the time I almost fell off a cliff, the time I got a fishhook through my finger. We talked about deaths in the family, and she would sit with her eyes wide, not saying a word, listening as if her life depended on it.”