Tag: on writing

Rules can ruin the kind of exciting language that makes literature rewarding, but some rules also enhance writing. It’s challenging to find the middle ground.

Author Jesmyn Ward sits down with Ta-Nehisi Coates to discuss slavery, superheroes, and how much you have to hate yourself to enjoy being famous.

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

Poet Patricia Lockwood offers ideas on how to keep writing in the unstable, toxic, distracting times we live in.

How a septuagenarian friend taught critic Daniel Mendelsohn to see the world as a writer.

The writer showed his students and friends how to remain an artist, even when one becomes a kind of cult figure.

The cover was striking: it showed a syringe. On the back cover one character leaned over a table, snorting cocaine. The calls from radio stations began, the advertising spots, the letters, above all the letters. Girls telling me about their first acid trip. Gay guys who’d been thrown out of their houses. Girls in love […]

Rebecca Solnit, writing in The New Yorker, offers a celebration of the imagination’s best ally: the ability to say “I don’t know.” Solnit looks at subtlety and subjectivity in her own writing, and in that of a hero of the art, Virginia Woolf: During my years as an art critic I used to joke that museums love artists the way that taxidermists love deer, and something […]

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 […]