Jets and Sharks of the Midwest
I may be a sixteen-year-old German-Irish girl living in flat Ohio, but West Side Story is a chute I slide down, and every day I’m a little more Marisol, working…
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Tamara Matthews
255 posts
Tamara Matthews is a Chicago-based freelance writer and editor. Visit tamaramatthews.com or find her on Twitter: @writingtoatee.
Writers: To Your Treadmills!
It’s actually a good thing for writers to step away from the keyboard every once in awhile. On the Kenyon Review blog, Aaron Gilbreath reminds us of the importance of…
Check out Any Time You Like, but You Can Never Leave
Do you think he stood her up? At the altar I mean? Or left her afterwards? Or she found out he was having an affair? Ollie seems almost gleeful. Unhappy…
A Story to Use and Reuse
At Necessary Fiction, Anna Rowser’s story “Breaking Down” effectively uses the subject of recycling as a metaphor to subtly explore what the narrator wants, needs, uses, reuses, and casts off…
Facing the Unknowable
For So to Speak, Madeleine Wattenberg interviews writer Anne Valente. In discussing Valente’s latest book, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, they touch on magical realism, using multiple points of view to…
Deplorable Men Need Love Too
She went on to become a Siberian housewife. He went on to call for the executions of ten million Russians. But she thought back on their evenings drinking and dancing.…
Writing in the Margins
Our literature movement was born from a need. People here wanted something to free themselves, they wanted to go to university, to treat their children better, but they didn’t know…
Standing with Standing Rock
colonizers can’t seem to grasp this reality indigenous resistance isn’t protest or disruption or civil unrest indigenous resistance is ceremony At Lit Hub, Demian DinéYazhi’ writes a poem of anguish and…
The Sights and Sounds of Delhi
In a wonderful piece at Electric Literature, Amy Yee gives a full taste of life in Delhi, India. She follows author Akhil Sharma, a PEN/Hemingway Award winner and recent recipient…
Don’t Touch, Be Touched
Publishers stress that readers nowadays want to feel like they’re in a relationship with an author. But I’ve just put everything I know into writing and in exchange you pay…
Life on the Rope
In a moving piece for Hunger Mountain, Dionisia Morales relates her experiences with rock climbing and her troubled first pregnancy: You convince yourself that those other women, the ones who have…
Ice Cream and Shrugging
Yesterday at the bus stop a fellow creature the gym ladies call “that particular element” asked for a hand—out, job, shake, off. That’s the door being female in public is…