Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay in Conversation, the Motive for Metaphor, and More

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:

On NPR’s Morning Edition, poet Elizabeth Alexander talks about the discoveries and challenges of processing the grief she experienced while writing The Light of the World, a memoir about the sixteen years she spent with her husband until his sudden death in 2012. “I simply wrote as an extension of my hand, as an extension of my body, trying to stay absolutely grounded with my hand on a table, with my feet on the ground, planted on an Earth that had so suddenly seemed unstable.”

At the Barnes & Noble Review, authors Roxane Gay and Ta-Nehisi Coates discuss Coates’s memoir, Between the World and Me, the responsibilities of the writer, how to talk and write about race in our culture, and more.

In related news, one year after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, thirteen young black authors share their reflections on the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and the increased visibility of police brutality occurrences over the past year. (LitHub)

The relationship between literature and visual art continues to thrive: Curators of the Guggenheim Museum’s Storylines exhibit, which “examines the diverse ways in which artists today engage narrative,” invited thirty writers—including John Ashbery, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Helen DeWitt—to contribute written reflections to specific works in the exhibit. (Paris Review)

Meanwhile, Joyce Carol Oates examines the elusiveness of literary inspiration and the motive for metaphor, tracing examples from Virginia Woolf to James Joyce to Henry David Thoreau. (New York Review of Books)

“I now had to let it all go, to read the novel not as my creation, but as a story.” Author and voiceover actor James Sie reflects on what he learned from the process of recording an audiobook of his debut novel, Still Life in Vegas. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

And finally, for those of you wondering if Shakespeare ever engaged in recreational marijuana use while writing his plays, recent forensic tests reveal that several clay pipes found in the Bard’s garden do indeed contain traces of cannabis. (Conversation)