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“Editing down is something I dread in the abstract because I know I can lose motivation easily. But this book has ingrained the lesson in me fully.” —Dennis E. Staples, author of Passing Through a Prairie Country
The author of Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird (Norton, 2025) recommends writers embrace circuitous storytelling structures, typical of nonwestern literature.
“The magic happens in the writing, on the page. That’s the high.” —Mariam Rahmani, author of Liquid: A Love Story
The author of Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird (Norton, 2025) encourages writers to introduce a surprising element more than halfway into their storytelling structure.
“This isn’t writer-stuff, it’s life-stuff that bears on the poems.” —Lesley Wheeler, author of Mycocosmic
“I had many beginnings and several endings, and I tried to arrange the poems in a way that might ask why that was.” —Austin Araujo, author of At the Park on the Edge of the Country
An excerpt from Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create by Elissa Altman, a compassionate, inspiring literary guide to transcend the fear and shame that can too often keep important stories from being written.
“Because the flip side of uncertainty is an invitation into mystery. And the reward for wading through mystery is transformation.” —Rebe Huntman, author of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle.
Oral historian Nyssa Chow considers the nested memories she belongs to, and invites readers to do the same.
“Nothing makes a clunky sentence more obvious than saying it out loud.” —Margie Sarsfield, author of Beta Vulgaris
