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Lyz Lenz

Lyz’s writing has been published in the New York Times Motherlode, Jezebel, Aeon, Pacific Standard, and others. Her book on midwestern churches is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. She has her MFA from Lesley and skulks about on Twitter @lyzl. Lyz is a member of The Rumpus Advisory Board and a full-time staff writer for the Columbia Journalism Review.
  • Lyz Lenz

    Low-Res Forever

    Maggie Messitt writes a defense of low-residency MFA programs: These are my people. And, because we have always lived away from one another, we learned from the start that writing is solitary, but we have each other. And, as a…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    Stop worrying about Buzzfeed and worry about yourself. That moment when you realize the Internet has changed the way you write. The darker side of the Internet writing business. Your leaky attention is evidence of brilliance. Probably. Remembering that thing…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Women, Writing, and Madness

    I found a precedent for girls like me in the work of confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. They represented a respectable compromise between “real literature” and my irrepressible tendency to let the personal creep into my writing. I…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Who Really Struggles Here?

    Amy Shearn makes the case for the struggle of author Dorothy Miller Richardson. As much as I do love my dear prolific weirdo Knausgaard, he hasn’t really done anything all that revolutionary. In fact, exactly a century ago, England saw…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    Google wants to rank searches on fact. But who decides what is a fact? Marissa Mayer is winning. Your dog ruined everything. You did too. For the last time, take those baby pictures down. It is time to log off…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Joan Didion on White People

    Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make even…

  • Lyz Lenz

    The Importance of Being Satire

    There is, in fact, a widespread view that humor abandons its true purpose when it ceases to punch upward from below, when it ceases to play David to the great Goliath of state or society, and instead punches down, targeting…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    Standing for reason. Touching everyone all the time always. Twitter: not a great contribution to the historical record. Will technology put an end to disability? A discussion with Slate. How the Internet’s libertarian experiment went rogue.

  • Lyz Lenz

    Lady Hermits

    Where have all the lady hermits gone? Rhian Sasseen is on the case: For women, for most of history, it’s been mother or maiden, daughter or wife. The roles shuffle, their names and details changing, but all share one feature:…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weird, Wonderful Woolf

    Emma Woolf (yes, a relation) writes about the personal life of Virginia Woolf: There has been much speculation about the sexual dimension of the Woolfs’ relationship: was the marriage ever consummated, was she frigid, was she a lesbian? In 1967…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    Vindicating psychiatry. The science of learning to read. Philip K. Dick warned you, but you didn’t listen. This robot can date for you. Love all over the world via Twitter. Studying social engagements and the marriage ones too.

  • Lyz Lenz

    When the Internet Clashes With Academia

    Marquette University is trying to fire a professor over a blog post. Predictably, it’s messy and involves issues of free speech, academic freedom, and the Internet.