creative process

“I can’t imagine myself without this book.” —Jana Larson, author of Reel Bay

Benjamin Percy cautions beginning writers to avoid overusing backstory in their fiction, offering strategies for moving the story forward by slipping a character’s history into the dramatic present.

When I stepped off the plane in Aspen, Colorado, in June 1997, I found a 60-year-old Hunter S. Thompson waiting for me in a convertible Cadillac blasting Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” at full volume. I was terrified; he was giddy. He was playing the song because it was a part of the soundtrack put together for the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that was scheduled to hit theaters the following summer, and he could not have been happier.

Novelists Caroline Leavitt and Jonathan Evison discuss the books that just didn’t work.

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a French scholar and literary translator discusses the need for translators to be well versed in intersectional knowledge of culture and history.

A personal and in-depth look at the life and poetry of John Berryman, with particular focus on The Dream Songs.

A writer learns that letting go of the need for perfectionism and allowing the creative impulse to guide the mind fluidly and freely can revitalize the practice of writing.