Someone Lived Here: Sarah Orne Jewett house in South Berwick, ME
The home, this town, and it’s residents were the inspiration for many of Sarah Orne Jewett’s novels and short stories. Her writing is often described as regionalism, but behind her…
A Computer-Free Day: How One Small Mistake Changed My Perspective on Productivity
I’ve often heard the advice that if you get blocked creatively, you should do something other than writing. Go for a walk, listen to music, visit a museum. Yes, yes,…
Truing the Narrative: Revising for Symmetry to Make Your Manuscript Sing
I taught a seven-week course on revision in a church basement. I had about a half dozen students, all of whom brought either a chapter from a longer work-in-progress, a…
The People’s Recorder: A Giant Listening Project
During the height of the Great Depression, the U.S government hired out-of-work writers and laid-off reporters and sent them out to record the stories of all kinds of Americans. Called…
The Literature of Illness, Healing
Bellevue Literary Review (BLR)
A dream denied: My 54-year quest to publish a short story in F&SF
To start, one of the problems with the Must Read Magazines business model is that any progress achieved by a single author doesn’t accrue to all authors. Each author must…
Quite Contrary
Arundhati Roy’s memoir of her mother
Looking for Love in a Time of Global Loneliness: A Profile of Kiran Desai
Within the first few pages of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai’s stunning new novel, the fissures among generations, cultures, classes, and countries become abundantly clear. When Dadaji…
Our Opinions Are Correct: We’re Still Traumatized By This Writing Debate
Not long ago, everybody was arguing about whether characters need to be "relatable". We get to the bottom of a debate that still makes us intensely grouchy. Plus we talk…
An Agent’s Perspective on Literary Magazines
Literary magazines, both online and in print, are such an important means of supporting creative work—for writers, readers, and the staff of those publications—and they’ve proved to be a great…