The Ungrateful Stranger: Whose Story Deserves Welcome?
On a spring evening in 2016, the day after Donald Trump won a series of primaries cementing his candidacy, I stepped into a hushed auditorium in midtown Manhattan and found…
The LGBTQ+ Literary Resistance
In November 2024, PEN America released its key findings from over ten thousand documented cases of book bans that occurred in the 2023–2024 school year: Thirty-nine percent of reported books…
Writers With Day Jobs: Earning a Living Outside of Literature
In 2018, as a younger writer in a different phase of life, I was thrilled to interview prolific author William Vollmann. A digital magazine employed me at the time, but…
Do Your Research: Using the Tools of Journalism to Write More Vivid Fiction
Endless research can be an occupational hazard. Johns taught a summer historical fiction workshop where only one writer out of ten brought pages for critique—the other nine had spent years…
The Retreat Has Left the Group Chat: Planning and Executing a Successful Retreat With Writer Friends
The writers I spoke with agree: Myriad options exist for how to organize a retreat that’s generative, meaningful, and fun; there’s no one way to do this. Are travel and…
Retreats Run by Writers, for Writers
While many writer-run retreats are fairly new, and their founders are still tinkering with the format, some like Dallagiacomo are plotting ways to turn them into lasting institutions. In the…
The Room Where It Happened: The Delights, Oddities, and Haunted Ephemera of Residencies at Writers’ Homes
In many cases, that strange magic of the in-between, combined with the intimacy of submerging so fully in an artist’s material life, seems to affect residents in unexpected ways. Writers…
Of Dust and Dreams: A Profile of Karen Russell
Karen Russell’s new novel, The Antidote, was born of a single image: A woman holds a sparkling emerald-green horn to her ear through which she receives someone’s secret and stores…
Dismantling the Mother Shelf: Expanding Our Thinking About Women’s Stories of Parenthood
When it comes to the Mother Shelf, it’s tempting to shrug our collective shoulders and say, Well, that’s just how book marketing works. But the uncomfortable truth is that publishers,…
Q&A: Stewart Battles Book Bans at PRH
In September 2024, during Banned Books Week, Penguin Random House (PRH) expanded its Intellectual Freedom Taskforce, a group dedicated to protecting the freedom to read, by naming Rosie Stewart senior…