Posts by author
Theodora Messalas
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Hometown Hero
At BuzzFeed, Tracy Clayton reflects on returning home to Louisville for Muhammad Ali’s funeral and the ways in which a place and its people can attempt to hold each other: You want to dismantle it and start all over and…
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Hope Floats
For The New Inquiry, Autumn Whitefield-Madrano does a close read of hope—what it is, what it isn’t, and the furtive, metered ways that women and cosmetics companies partake in it: I long to see a greater embrace of hope. Not necessarily…
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The Evolution of Adrienne Rich
Over at the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson marks the publication of Adrienne Rich’s collected works with an examination of the incredible arc of her life and career. And instead of condemning her many transformations as a kind of flightiness, he…
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Until Death
There’s a piece of writing advice that tritely insists that great pain makes for great writing. In reality, it often takes years to find the words for a painful event, and even then there is the nagging insufficiency of words…
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In Mourning
Over at Lit Hub, Christopher Soto (aka Loma) reflects on Orlando and writes movingly about the experience of holding an identity that is constantly targeted and executed in our world: He propped me up like the roof of a cathedral,…
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These Are My Confessions
Many poets—male poets especially—are secretly anxious that someone will call their poetry a frivolous, feminine pursuit. And instead of embracing the potential charge of frivolity—allowing themselves to be free of it or even to toy with it—those same poets draw lines in…
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Honor Thy Parents
For Lit Hub, Sarah Hepola takes on the muddy ethical questions of memoir-writing by asking her mother and father what it felt like to be portrayed in her book: I was being paranoid, but those of us who write memoirs…
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Writing Beyond the Quota
When the mainstream doesn’t carve out space for their work, writers must take the situation to their own hands, creating their own platforms, even their own communities of dedicated readers. Over at Electric Literature, Adrian L. Jawort discusses the process…
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Lost Languages
When we can’t bear to look at the object of our desire straight-on, a metaphor becomes necessary. Over at The Toast, Iona Sharma throws herself into the study of Gaelic, contemplating its beauty and its dwindling use as she unpacks…
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Our Bodies, Our Selves
For Hazlitt, Lauren Mitchell interviews Mona Awad about her book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, and together they attest to the unhappiness and emotional energy that society demands of fat women, and the toll it takes on…
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What’s in a Name?
If there are indeed an infinite number of universes, it’s nice to think there might be one where all of the books we have come to know bear their original, author-intended titles. For the Paris Review, Tony Tulathimutte pulls back…
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Gimme Gimme JSTOR
The question of access continues to plague the academic community—if academia is truly about knowledge and discovery, why are there still so many barriers to the unfettered sharing of information? The architects of digital “pirate libraries” around the world are…