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…
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…
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,…
An Angel at My Table
An Angel at My Table is a 1990 biographical drama film directed by Jane Campion. The film is based on Janet Frame's three autobiographies, To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel…
How the Light Gets In: The Nightlight
In being a parent and being a writer, there is no routine, no one way of doing things that is right; some things that we must do to get the…
How the Light Gets In: The Moon
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve lost access to much of the community I’ve relied on as a writer. My husband has profound long COVID—I don’t want to risk…