The Life of the Mind: A Conversation with Elizabeth Scanlon
Elizabeth Scanlon discusses her debut full-length collection, Lonesome Gnosis, brains and trains, and poetry as prayer.
...moreElizabeth Scanlon discusses her debut full-length collection, Lonesome Gnosis, brains and trains, and poetry as prayer.
...more“I always feel like I’m starting over. I don’t know how I ever wrote a poem. I really do have that feeling.”
...moreEileen G’Sell discusses her debut collection, Life After Rugby, how and why she chose her book’s title, and challenging gender categories.
...moreThe stories [in THE TRUTH ABOUT ME], like Marburg herself, are insightful, witty, to the point, and told with her wonderfully dry sense of humor.
...moreThe new Editor-in-Chief of The Believer dismantles stereotypes of Las Vegas, discusses the magazine’s acquisition, and makes a case for bringing journalism into the academy.
...moreJenny Zhang discusses her story collection Sour Heart, trying to escape the past, collective versus individual responsibility for trauma, and love as imprisonment.
...morePoet and essayist Jennifer S. Cheng discusses her collection House A, working “in the dark,” and the idea of home.
...moreI have known the poet Elizabeth Metzger since kindergarten—and ever since I have known her, she has been a poet. When we played the The Game of Life, a board game, she wrote small lyrics about the futures we ended the game with; when I had a crush, she wrote light verse about the boys […]
...moreAbigail Ulman talks about her debut collection Hot Little Hands, the limitations of the cultural narrative, her paralyzing pre-publication fears, and why she loves adolescent narrators.
...moreRebecca Schiff discusses her debut collection The Bed That Moved, choosing narrators who share similarities with each other and with herself, and whether feminism and fiction-writing conflict.
...moreNovelist Christopher Boucher talks about writing so-called “experimental” fiction, both embracing and denying the metaphor, and apples.
...morePoet Terese Svoboda talks about her biography of the socialist-anarchist firebrand and modernist poet Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You, and remembers a time when the political was printed in newspapers.
...moreRobyn Schiff talks about her collection A Woman of Property, the long con of “owning” land, her passion for early novels, how motherhood changed her poetry, and the generative powers of form.
...moreJessa Crispin talks about The Dead Ladies Project and The Creative Tarot, founding Bookslut, why she has an antagonistic relationship with the publishing industry, and her estrangement from modern feminism.
...morePoet Kathleen Spivack discusses releasing her debut novel Unspeakable Things at age seventy-seven.
...moreAmy Fusselman discusses her latest memoir/manifesto/philosophical treatise Savage Park, the rise of a new kind of nonfiction, and what kind of art “discombobulates her and makes her scream.”
...moreMary Karr talks about her new book The Art of Memoir, the perception of memoir from a “trashy” form, the virtues of poetry, and the complexity of truth-telling.
...moreTo make someone feel as they did as a child…is not only an act of love, but a gift. The Great Beauty is such a gift: to watch the film is to be transported back into childhood.
...moreIt is a world where camp has replaced art. There is something safe and comforting in the smallness of this world; it is a world we recognize.
...moreIf you’re reading this now, you’ve probably slept through enough nights to know what it is to wake up to the absence of someone you loved. The ache of without seems to spread forth from within to taint the day, and all the days, ahead.
...more