Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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Heal Together
The Internet may have irreversibly altered the forms activism takes, but there is still room for change. Christopher Soto reflects on activist frameworks used in 2015 and offers their strategies for working toward a more inclusive poetry community in the…
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No New Friends
A connection so fundamentally optional doesn’t provide the same ambivalence and tension you get with alcoholic parents, narcissistic spouses, or resentful bosses. If your friend abuses you or your trust, you can just walk away. Slate’s Laura Miller explains why…
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There All Along
After all they’ve done for literature, it’s about time someone wrote an ode to bookstore cats: It began as a working relationship, but became something more than that, something deeper.
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Better Late
Inspiration is a fickle mistress—sometimes the Muse doesn’t show up for years. Louis Begley may have gotten a late start, but after beginning his first novel at age fifty-six, he hasn’t stopped writing. The author reflects on his career for…
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A Life Worth Writing About
Memoirs get a bad rap, for reasons both legitimate and superficial. With a work of unintentional autobiography under his belt, Lucas Mann grapples with the stigma of the reflexive: To put it bluntly, memoir is the only literary form still…
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Wherefore Art Thou
To honor the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Shakespeare Library is sending the First Folio around the country. Looks like the book tour really is dead.
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Lock the gates, board the doors, AWP is nigh. Vincent Scarpa offers his tips for surviving the week, including this gem: …arrive alive if you can.
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Searching for a Self
If a link falls on the Internet and no one is online to click it, does it really make a connection? Michael Seidlinger takes on the Sisyphean task of building identity in cyberspace: We have all become Sisyphus, pushing our…
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The Story Behind the Story
At this stoplight, you might begin to think, “I’ve been here before, there is nothing new to notice.” But it seems to me that we actually live here, and we often fail to notice what is in our own yard.…
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This Ain’t a Zine It’s an Arms Race
Die publishing industry; zines forever! Liska Jakobs reports live from last weekend’s LA Zine Fest, where DIY publishing continues to flourish even as the contradictions of modern capitalism reveal themselves: You don’t need an MFA to make a zine. You sure as…
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Rich Enough That I Don’t Have to Tell ‘Em That I’m Rich
Since its publication twenty years ago, Frances Mayes’s memoir Under the Tuscan Sun has transformed its namesake Italian setting into a sort of synonym for a wealthy lifestyle. Travel writer Jason Wilson revisited the work only to discover exactly the charms…
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Women Writers, Whatever That Means
I had considered envying men before—I pretend to envy things like their higher incidence of ungrounded confidence and monomania, but I don’t really envy those things, and I’m not sure I even believe in them… In an excerpt published in…