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In this Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination event, Guadalupe Nettel, Ayşegül Savaş, and Maylis de Kerangal talk about their recent story collections and how short story collections are received in the current publishing industry. Savaş’s first story collection, Long Distance, is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Autism wants to be understood, researched, and recognized as a disability, not a disease.” In this Button Poetry video, Kay Kassirer reads their poem “Autism Speaks (after Arvind Nandakumar).”
The rate at which the Earth rotates has been gaining speed, and as a result, days have been slowly getting shorter over the last ten years, according to a recent New York Times article. Yet, for many millennia before, the days were gradually growing longer, with a T. rex living through days that were only about twenty-three and a half hours long. Though these incremental changes in time are too tiny in scale for us to register, time can certainly feel like it moves at different rates. Write a personal essay that recounts a situation from your past that took place either over a seemingly expanded or contracted span of time. Experiment with how you speed up or slow down your retelling, either mimicking or contradicting the essay’s pacing with how the experience felt.
“In a lot of ways, this popular culture is the water that I swim in. I can’t escape it.” In this Magers & Quinn Booksellers event, Alice Bolin reads an essay about Star Trek from her latest collection, Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse (Mariner Books, 2025), and discusses technology, cults, and feminism with author Sally Franson.
In the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure directed by Ruben Östlund, a family on a ski vacation in the French Alps has a scare when a controlled avalanche threatens the lodge where they are staying and the father runs away from the oncoming snow, leaving behind his wife and two young children. All remain safe but the event causes tension in their marriage. Over dinner with friends, they discuss how in moments of crisis one would hope to do the heroic thing, but one never really knows until something actually happens. Write a short story that begins with an intense and startling event and build your story around each character’s response. What sorts of personality traits are revealed in the aftermath? You might play around with incorporating different characters’ perspectives or versions of what happened to provide tension.
The product of fifteen years directing the Visiting Writers Reading Series at Whitman College, Katrina Roberts has gathered into one anthology the wisdom shared by the authors who have joined the series. The volume collects tips and wisdom, confessions and secrets, and inspiration and prompts from over eighty poets, fiction writers, and memoirists often shared during Q&A sessions: Lydia Davis addresses “Endings and Order; or Order and Endings,” Jo Ann Beard speaks about how fiction and nonfiction overlap, Galway Kinnell talks about animals that “swam into my consciousness,” Brenda Shaughnessy speaks on “radical spontaneity,” and Lia Purpura addresses questions that “strike fear in her heart.” These insights offer inspiration, support, and direction for any writer with questions about craft and the writing life.
In this Books Are Magic event, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda reads from her English translation of Yoko Tawada’s essay collection Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions, 2025) and discusses Tawada’s defamiliarization of the Japanese and German languages in a conversation with fellow translator Susan Bernofsky.
In this episode of The Seeds podcast with Alana Hadid, poet aja monet reads from her second collection, Florida Water (Haymarket Books, 2025), and reflects on the role of faith in her artistry and activism, and the current state of movement organizing for Palestine. Florida Water is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In a recent interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Poetry series by Chloe Garcia Roberts, the late Fanny Howe, who passed away on July 9, spoke of a revelatory experience writing “with the environment” at Annaghmakerrig, an artists’ retreat where she wrote her 1995 collection, O’Clock. “It was complete solitude, and an actual attempt to write, for the first time, with the environment,” says Howe. “Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees, dancing around in the environment of Ireland, which I know by its smell.” This week, find a spot outside as close to nature as possible, perhaps simply a location with trees, and try to sink into the landscape. Write a poem that captures the feelings of your surroundings, meditating on minute sensory details and the emotions that the environment evokes.
