The Archive and the Everyday
The author of Spoken Word: A Cultural History and The Study of Human Life examines the power of recovering lost literary voices.
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Craft Capsules
In our weekly series of craft essays, some of the best and brightest minds in contemporary literature explore their craft in compact form, articulating their thoughts about creative obsessions and curiosities in a working notebook of lessons about the art of writing.
A Shed Full of Golden Shovels
The author of Spoken Word: A Cultural History and The Study of Human Life considers how poets collaborate across time and form.
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On Covering
The author of Spoken Word: A Cultural History and The Study of Human Life explores how writers might “cover” literary works as musicians do songs.
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Notes on Irreverent Translation
The author of Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues offers an approach to critically engaging with a colonialist literary canon.
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Writing the Blur
The author of Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues considers how archival photography can provide a rich source for literary and sociopolitical inquiry.
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The Essay as Experiment
The author of Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues explores how formal experimentation and play can help move a writing project forward.
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The Accidental Poetry of Ninety-Nine-Cent Stores
The author of peep finds poetic surprises in the workaday language of commerce and culture.
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Sometimes I Think That This Is What It Is to Write a Poem (and at Such Times I Am, Without a Doubt, a Monster of Grandiosity)
The author of peep considers the ecstatic freedom of writing poetry.
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Somewhere Somebody Is Doing Something Right Now
The author of peep offers an exercise in negative capability.
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How Do You Know When to Stop Revising?
The authors of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing engage in a dialogue about textual doneness.
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Found Forms, Found Stories
The author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story offers a lesson in becoming a verbal junk collector.
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The Sentence and the Sentence Story
The author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story investigates the power of a single sentence, long or short.
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The Fullness of Omission
The author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story explores what is gained by cutting elements of a narrative.
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The Erotics of Brevity
The author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story ponders the seductive power of laconic prose.
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Storytelling in Poetry
The author of What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems examines poetic approaches to narrative.
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Vernacular Currency
The author of What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems explores the poetic potential of vernacular language.
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Disturbing the Lyric “I”
The author of What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems considers how lyric poetry may communicate beyond the realm of private experience.
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In Defense of Interiority and Backstory
The author of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling considers how best to get into characters’ heads.
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When to Break the Rules
The author of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling explores fiction’s holy commandments—and when a writer has license to defy them.
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Openness to Influence
The author of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling argues that writers should be as open to influence during revision as they are at the beginning of a project.
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Ten Ways of Being in the Weeds With Your Novel, and Ten Ways Out
The author of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling counts the many ways a novelist may get lost, but ultimately find a way through, a book project.
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The Quotidian and the Code
The author of The White Mosque troubles the boundary between realist and genre fiction.
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Old Verdurin in His Frock Coat: On Literature’s Found Objects
The author of The White Mosque considers how writing holds space for the accidental, the random, and the stray.
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Fiat Lux: On Literary Atmospheres
The author of The White Mosque charts the ambience of literary worlds.
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Blessed Citation
The author of The White Mosque offers an ode to intertextuality.
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