The Long and Rolling Line
The author of Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025) considers the lineage of his own loping lines and encourages poets to try them.
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Ten Questions for Jade Chang
“I think I’m a natural maximalist, and I still enjoy orchestrating a complex, layered scene or sentence, but I often found myself paring down versus building up.” —Jade Chang, author of What a Time to Be Alive
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9,131 Sentences: How One Enormous Spreadsheet Taught Me to Be a Better Writer
Writing a book is a daunting challenge—but the texts we know and love can help. A nonfiction writer describes how a methodically organized spreadsheet of favorite quotes aided her journey from proposal to finished memoir.
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Double Dreaming, Double Imagining: A Profile of Douglas Kearney
In the poetry collection I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, Douglas Kearney shatters traditional expectations by transforming images and texts into dynamic conversations about Black identity, personhood, and art.
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Why I Drive: Tuning Into Highway Poetics
Drawing strength from traditions of moving across the land, a poet describes the joy and presence of mind that driving brings. Without the constant pull of screens, the road opens up an ideal space for creation.
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The Room Where It Happened: The Delights, Oddities, and Haunted Ephemera of Residencies at Writers’ Homes
Residency programs at the homes of famous writers offer both the luxury of space and time to write and deep immersion into a literary hero’s everyday world, often providing newfound clarity and insight into ongoing work.
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How the Light Gets In: The Volcano
What does it mean to truly let loose as a writer? The author of I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat urges us to lean into the fire and pressure head-on, to let everything out on the page and offer it up to the world.
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How the Light Gets In: The Anglerfish
Inspired by the bioluminescence of the anglerfish, the author of Something New Under the Sun encourages writers to furnish their own light and plumb the unknown depths of their text with the hunger of a deep-sea predator.
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How the Light Gets In: The Firefly
Taking inspiration from a creature of the summer, a seasoned writer suggests a few approaches to stimulate, refresh, and gather your thoughts for the next stage of writing and spark your imagination with play.
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How the Light Gets In: The Camera Obscura
Writing and revising often seem to hinge on bringing new possibilities into focus. A poet considers the camera obscura as a metaphor for how an inversion of the light can transform and attune us to the moment.
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