A late bloomer as far as relationships go, my first encounter with heartbreak came from the track. It was junior year. The district meet: all big Texas sky and girls next to me adjusting hair ties and heat waves shimmering ahead. At that point in my life, I had devoted myself entirely to running. I […]
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Posted inStory
Telling Stories In Order to Live: On Writing and Money
Sarah Menkedick examines the perils inherent in trying to earn a living as a full-time writer.
Posted inNonfiction
In Pocahontas County, Deep Divisions and a Gruesome Discovery
In an excerpt from ‘The Third Rainbow Girl,’ Emma Copley Eisenberg interrogates various social conditions that might have contributed to a mysterious double murder in West Virginia in 1980.
Posted inNonfiction
I Will Always Love You: A Dolly Parton Reading List
Happy birthday, Dolly Parton! Here are seven longreads about the American singer-songwriter.
Posted inReading List
Why We Write Memoir: A Reading List
“I have spent innumerable afternoon hours with the essays below, each writer’s words a lifeline pulling me from the deep.”
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Story
The Power of a Judith Krantz Sex Scene
A ‘90s romance novel offers a glimpse of queer possibility and illuminates the complications of writing about queer love.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Story
American Dirt: A Bridge to Nowhere
“Jeanine Cummins can write about Mexico — but she will be judged on whether her writing actually captures the experiential and emotional and ethical complexity of that place, and she will be judged with extra care because she is an outsider.”
Posted inNonfiction
“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom
“We were interested in dead girls, but so interested in them that we were trying to do the opposite of what had been done before.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Current Events, Nonfiction, Quotes
A Portrait of the Artist as a Monster
Does art exist in the world of personality and petty grievance and predation, or does it float in a morally-neutral ether? Depends who you ask.
Posted inNonfiction
Hot for Teacher
When a student in her writing workshop submits a piece suggesting his character could ‘take’ a teacher just like her ‘atop her desk,’ Courtney Zoffness is flooded with memories of men touching her against her will.
