Posts by author
Claire Burgess
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You’re Not a Real Writer
If anything, other people’s success should only encourage me: if they did it, so can I. But that’s where the self-doubt steps in and says, They can do it BUT YOU NEVER WILL BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT A REAL WRITER. It’s…
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Read More Women
The message sent to women that what they are writing isn’t important or serious enough is not a new one. It is as old as literature itself. And its persistence has everything to do with how women’s literature is treated…
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Creativity and Mental Illness
Though I did not know it then, Adeline was not just a work of fiction, or an act of literary ventriloquism. It was my suicide note. Had I succeeded in taking my life, this would have been clear. At Lit…
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All the Exclaiming Ladies
The exclamation point doesn’t mean what you think it does anymore. At The Huffington Post, Maddie Crum explores the punctuation mark’s changing and increasingly gendered usage: instead of conveying strong emotion, the mark now connotes levity, and apparently women are…
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Quit Your Day Job
So what happened in those eight missing years to make a well-reviewed, commercially successful author fall so far so fast? Heartbreak? Rehab? Addiction to designer shoes? Easy. She took the wrong day job. The conundrum of how to support yourself…
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UK Publishing is Racist, Too
The Writing the Future report . . . found that the “best chance of publication” for a black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) writer was to write literary fiction conforming to a stereotypical view of their communities, addressing topics such…
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The 2014 VIDA Count
The 2014 VIDA Count is in, this time including the first annual Women of Color VIDA Count. While the results of the VIDA Count show a general trend toward gender parity, the results of the WOC VIDA Count, though incomplete,…
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Hugos, Hijacked
What has happened is simple: an angry mob has exploited a loophole in how nominations occur in order to crash a party that they seemingly detest anyway. The gaming of the Hugo Awards Ballot wasn’t executed for frivolous reasons: it…
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No, Totally
For The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz delves into the history of that short, mysterious word that can function as five or more parts of speech, be its own sentence, and now even reverse its meaning: no.
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Every Word Counts
Great writers, along with everything else they are doing, stage a readerly experience and lead their readers through it from first word on first page to last. Mapping out what those paths might look like is as worthy a critical…
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Autism on the Page
Even if we already know our identity, proper representation helps us accept that identity. It’s well-established that negative/no representation has awful effects on self-esteem. When we see no one like us—or when we’re only ever the troubled sibling, never the…
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Family Secrets
Memoirist, cartoonist, and creator of the famous Bechdel Test, Alison Bechdel talks to The Millions about the evolution of her art, winning a MacArthur “Genuis Grant,” and searching for answers in her past: I feel like in a way that’s…