Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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A Woman of the Ear
If Flaubert was ‘a man of the quill,’ then perhaps I am ‘a woman of the ear.’ My interviews aren’t interviews as such. Just talks. We just talk and my role is to listen. Listening was difficult at first because…
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Poet Tripping
Carol Ann Duffy, the UK’s poet laureate, has invited three poets to join her on a road trip through England, Wales and Scotland, which will take them from Falmouth to St Andrews over the course of a fortnight. From June…
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Countries, Languages, and Writing
But what about those writers who move to another country and do not change language, who continue to write in their mother tongue many years after it has ceased to be the language of daily conversation? Do the words they…
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The Long Lost Writing Life
My only real want along the way was to illuminate something about the human condition in a voice and from a point of view that could belong only to me. And if a bid for posterity beats in the heart…
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Accidental Transformation
Since the accident, he hasn’t been the same. He talks a little lower. He’s isn’t quick to laugh. He takes more time to himself in the evenings, and isn’t his chipper self in the mornings. Something about the accident changed…
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Kids and Wars
At one point in the conversation, Watts said: “I always imagined those soldiers using paintball guns, that the war was just a large-scale version of what we played as kids.” I confessed that the same thought had occurred to me.…
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Long-Distance Writing
Over at The Collapsar, Brian Oliu pens a stunning essay on writing, running, and changing one’s perception of both the body and the prose: This, to me, is what a successful essay does: it confesses before the writer is ready–instead…
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Lost Labor
Certain ways of avoiding a childbirth scene in contemporary fiction have become almost predictable, as clichéd as the clothes scattered on the floor in a movie rated PG-13: the frantic car ride to the hospital, followed by a jump cut…
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Dance, Write, Love
Before this semester in Italy, I had enjoyed writing for school, but now for the first time I was driven to write for myself. I began to need to write like I had needed to dance. Was I replacing one…
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When Realism Is Magical
Fabulism is a lot like this purse. It seems to belong to this world, but doesn’t follow all of the rules. It beckons you. It’s off. The more you explore it, the more mystery and power it has. Over at…
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Talking Passover
Time to gather for Seder: over at McSweeney’s, Rumpus Funny Women Editor Elissa Bassist has a handy guide (or a cautionary tale) of conversation topics to get through Passover’s rituals.
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Houses of Joy
Over at the New York Times, Ayana Mathis and Siddhartha Deb consider which subjects are most underrepresented in contemporary literature: joy and struggling for a place to live.