The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Explore your inner soundtrack, make your character sweat, and embrace your many identities—three prompts to keep you writing this summer.
Department: The Literary Life
The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
After the death of her mother, a writer considers the ways we increasingly write our own obituaries in this excerpt from The Art of Death, forthcoming from Graywolf Press.
The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Compose a collaborative renga with a friend, inject surreal motifs into your fiction, and explore your relationship with a parent or child through the lens of one embarrassing memory—three prompts to keep your pen on the page this spring.
Tell Me I’m Good: The Writer’s Quest for Reassurance
Six writing instructors offer strategies for allaying students’ anxieties, engaging critically with their work, and responsibly giving them what they most desire: praise.
The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Try your hand at poetry translation, write a story with a deeply flawed protagonist, and reflect on your relationship to the natural world—three prompts to ignite your imagination this spring.
Where We Write: Fountain City, Wisconsin
After decades away, a decorated poet returns to his hometown in rural Wisconsin to read from a recent collection inspired by the very people he now finds himself addressing.
The Necessity of Failure: An Examination of the Writing Life
A fiction writer reflects on the meandering and far-from-perfect path that led to the publication of his second novel, Perfect Little World.
Writing Badly: The True Source of Inspiration
A poet explains how allowing ourselves to write badly is not only generative, but can also break the habit of self-censorship and can lead to our best work.
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Vision, Interpretation, Play: A Portrait of Collaboration
The often playful process of writer-artist collaboration is explored through a close examination of the book Alphabetique: 26 Characteristic Fictions by poet Molly Peacock and visual artist Kara Kosaka.
Swimming to the End: A (Plot) Twist in the River
A precarious attempt to swim across the Hudson River helps a fiction writer explore the pathways of plot—through shifting currents, pain and exhaustion, and an unanticipated twist.
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