Posts by author
Katie O’Brien
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All Work and No Pay
At The New Republic, Phoebe Maltz Bovy reflects on the implications of the recent #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter trend, taking note of two distinct categories of responses: those expressing outrage that someone assumed they do not make a living off of writing, and…
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Write Like A Mother
In a poignant and funny essay, Vela Magazine’s Sarah Menkedick discusses being a writer while being a mother: The house looks as though someone has flipped it upside down and shaken it, we’re surviving off cans of refried beans, the poor…
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Street Art as Literature
In Street Messages, German photographer Nicholas Ganz compiles photographs of messages in public spaces, illustrating the literary side of the global street art movement—he calls it “a new, modern form of poetry.” Slate provides a sampling of some of the…
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Growing Up With Signs
At Vela Magazine, Katie Booth writes on the historical repression of sign language in favor of oralism, and her experience growing up hearing with a deaf grandmother: Everywhere she went, she brought Sign. In my mind, it was an act of…
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The Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda
Last month archivists rediscovered twenty poems by renowned Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, known especially for his love poems and political activism. These previously “lost” poems were never translated into English, and Copper Canyon Press will translate and publish them in a…
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Travel Writer’s Burden
In a thoughtful essay for Boston Review, Jessa Crispin reflects on the gender dynamics of travel writing, and the genre’s penchant for a colonial mentality that persists in today’s narratives: Any travel writer who deviates from gender-defined roles risks being…
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Mapping Literary Road Trips
What is more American than the road trip? Steven Melendez has created an astonishingly detailed interactive map of the beloved institution as documented in twelve works of American literature. The books featured include Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road,…
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Economy of Language
The Global Language Monitor estimates that the English language has over a million words. In contrast, the invented language Toki Pona has just over a hundred—a feature “designed to change how speakers think.” Its simplicity, besides making the language easy…
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Literary Food Porn
The joy of reading about the meals of others shows that, in many ways, we are simple creatures: by merely looking upon someone else eating we can feel better fed. Over at the New Yorker, Bee Wilson contemplates why reading…
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Writing in Exile
For Electric Literature, Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon recounts his unexpected turn to literature after returning to Guatemala in his early thirties, the paranoia and danger that accompanies being a writer amidst corruption, and leaving the country again after publishing his…
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Litmags Prevail
Once your journal exists, it will wing its way into a world already full of journals, like a paper airplane into a recycling bin, or onto a Web already crowded with literary sites. Why would you do such a thing?…
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The Moral of the Story
At the New York Times, Alice Gregory and Pankaj Mishra discuss the role of moralism in the novel—and conclude that authors should seek to question and provoke rather than preach: Not only does moral preoccupation corrupt the artfulness of fiction, but…