The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Create a found poem, break your habits, or be an ambassador to your own country—three prompts to ignite the creative process.
Department: The Literary Life
Superpowered Storytelling
An author, essayist, and DC Comics writer shares what he’s learned from writing comics, and how the process has shaped his narrative voice.
This Is Your Brain on Fear: Trauma and Storytelling
How do we record traumatic events when our survival often depends on us not thinking at all? Fiction writer and essayist J. T. Bushnell explores this question through the lens of a house fire, combining ideas of memory, storytelling, and neuroscience to investigate the intersections of truth, trauma, and narrative.
The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Explore your parental relationships, gain unexpected access to somebody else’s data, and assess the qualities of a favorite celebrity—three prompts to ignite the creative process.
Poet, Writer, Imposter: Learning to Believe in Myself
A poet, novelist, and memoirist investigates the experience of imposter syndrome—that insidious feeling of being a fraud—and poses the question, What would happen if writers stopped viewing their careers as a series of happy accidents?
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The Idea of Happiness: Report From Literary Denmark
In a continuing series examining the lives of writers in international writing communities, contributing editor Stephen Morison Jr. spends time with three authors in Denmark to explore the country’s literary scene, and the language of happiness.
The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Explore the emotions of color, shout your strongest feelings, and write for a vending machine—three prompts to ignite the creative process.
Teeth Marks: The Translator's Dilemma
A Nigerian-born author and professor provides an in-depth look at two versions of the same text, one in the original Yoruba, and an English translation by Nobel Prize–winning author and translator Wole Soyinka. In his comparison of the two, Obioma poses the question: Is the writer who translates another writer preforming an act of creation or destruction?
The Art of Biography: Falling In and Out of Love
An author and Guggenheim fellow details her journey in writing a biography of radical poet Lola Ridge.
Dangerous Writing: Go to Your Battlefield
“By forcing the writer to look at an event that changed her life, she has to come to terms with something that is intimate.” A prolific author and teacher explores the process of facing the deepest, heaviest, and saddest parts of ourselves in order to write our innermost truths.
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