Coming Home to Writing: Exile and Literary Citizenship
Having left her home in Havana as a refugee at the age of three, an author explores the truth of what it means to be a writer in exile.
Department: The Literary Life
Where We Write: New York City Via Bavaria, Germany
Learning to inhabit a new country and language helps a German-born writer discover her voice and understand how that voice hinges on the place in which she lives.
The Problem of Entitlement: A Question of Respect
A writer and workshop instructor grapples with what he sees as an increasing resistance toward the work of established authors among writing students.
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The Private Dwelling: Three Poets on Keeping (and Destroying) Journals
Writers discuss what prompted them to start or return to journal writing, and why sometimes it’s better to destroy rather than preserve such catalogues of the past.
Why We Write: My Father’s Voice
A daily phone call from India spurs an emerging writer to complete her first novel.
Perversity of Spirit: What It Takes to Be a Writer
One author argues that talent is the least important part of becoming a writer.
The Art of Reading Lauren Slater
In her genre-defying book Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, published in 2000 by Random House, Lauren Slater toys with the conventions of fact, fiction, memory, and art, introducing fabricated occurrences and physical conditions to unveil the truth of her experience—and of the human condition.
Why We Write: The Wounded and Enduring
Through her work with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, a poet discovers that writing can grant a type of freedom to incarcerated men—and in the process finds her own sense of peace in the wake of personal trauma.
Ghost in the Machine: A Typewriter, a Postcard, and the Objects of Memory
A writer’s search for a typewriter brings her face to face with both present and past, and helps her understand ideas of friendship, memory, connection, and loss.
Where We Write: Kansas
Years after leaving her family farm in Kansas, a memoirist discovers meaning in her work while revisiting the past, and exploring her family’s relationship to the land.
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