You’re seated at a large table with a delegation of professors and several classmates. The smell of old books, of the once finely polished furniture, and the faded tapestry rug tinges your nose. You wonder why they would choose such a poorly lit room to have you read in…
Category: Writing Life
Our Writing Life column archive, which features an array of guest contributors.
The Writing Life: The Basis for Everything Else by William Henderson
At a playground near my apartment in Boston, my children on side-by-side swings, their mother, my ex-wife, pushing our daughter while our son pumps his legs until he is higher than he intended. He asks for help slowing down, then stopping. I catch his legs and hold him steady. He laughs. Let go, he tells…
The Writing Life: Generations by Lisa Ahn
I was raised on magic. My father always had a book at hand. I grew up with words as close as blankets, as nutritious as carrots or spinach or milk. They were necessary things, inviolate.
The Writing Life: An Open Letter to My Muse by Hilary Meyerson
As a writer, I often get the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” I also hear it often at book readings when they open up the floor to questions. I love watching other, more famous writers, grind their teeth as they struggle to answer.
The Writing Life: Writing About It by Michael Suppa
It’s the first moment of normalcy in the last four and a half months. Then, I glance at her walker, the portable table, the flowered box holding a mass of medication, and the moment is gone. I’m back at the hospital.
The Writing Life: Writing from the Sidelines by Lisa Ahn
I finished my first novel when I was forty years old and the shock of it, the rifting amazement, nearly carried me away. The pages hadn’t begun as a Book. I hadn’t intended to be a Writer.
The Writing Life: To Hear the Softly Spoken Magic Spells by William Henderson
Steal time to write, as if time is a commodity, something to hoard and, well, steal. From my children and from my friends and even from myself…
The Writing Life: Publish Envy by Hilary Meyerson
Jealousy is a bitch. Professional jealousy is a bitch with a book advance.
Writing Life: What if I never get that book deal? by Lisa Ahn
Most writers are seekers, restless. If we were satisfied with the here-and-now, the exactly-as-it-is, there would be no call to wander, to imagine otherwise. We pick at all the seams. We pry the edges of “what if?” We are good at doubt and wonder, at the possible and maybe.
Writing Life: The fact of the matter: Mythology as creative nonfiction by William Henderson
No matter your opinion about John D’Agata, recently under-fire for his slippery (some might say sloppy) handling of facts in his 2010 book, About a Mountain, the use of innovation (read: fudged facts) in nonfiction – which he argues is his right as the author, especially when helping foster a more artistic truth – created a genre, of sorts, situated between fiction and non, creative nonfiction, which even this magazine uses to define what it publishes every month.
