Department: The Literary Life

The assistant poetry editor of Able Muse offers his thoughts on coming to terms with the inevitability—and impersonality—of rejection in the world of literary magazines.

Iowa isn’t just the Writers’ Workshop. A native Iowan talks about how she learned to capture the true nature of her home state, and the stoic people who live there, in her writing.

A case for balancing action with introspection in fiction, in order to avoid “gumming up the gears of your story.”

A writer and editor shares her thoughts, as well as lessons learned from authors such as Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Celeste Ng, on writing of and from a culture that may be foreign to the reader: what do we explain, italicize, or translate? How do we navigate the divide between the ethnicity of a writer or character and that of her audience?