Features & Reviews
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Letting Go of What We Should Have Had: Adam Phillips’s On Giving Up
We first must recognize the path not taken as a burden that controlled us and will not surrender easily.
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Feeling My Way Along a Metaphorical Ledge: A Conversation with Nancy Miller Gomez
There’s always so much happening around us—we can’t possibly take it all in—but certain things seem to be a beacon for my attention.
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The First Book: Uche Okonkwo
Going out of one’s way to write what’s currently trendy, just because it’s trendy, can be counterproductive and take the pleasure out of writing.
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“There has to be peril”: A Conversation with Andromeda Romano-Lax
Suspense, as a genre, can be a Trojan Horse. It’s a strong vehicle that you can hide things within [to] explore ideas about culture, gender, language, or place.
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Unearthing the Past in The Safekeep
There is an elegant cadence to the prose, a slight twist in language to create a dynamic image of a simple nighttime scene. Two proud firs. The single star as the sky’s beauty mark.
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“I’m not trying to break you”: A Conversation with Carvell Wallace
The events are doing the writing for me, and my job as a stylist is to simply get out of the way and let the story tell itself.
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A Tight-Lipped Kind of Love: Jennifer Manthey’s The Fight
Through her terse yet piercing consideration of this school fight…Manthey asks us to look directly into the historically charged layers of the book’s eponymous fight.
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Living in The In Between: A Conversation with Anna Mantzaris
When women are in partnerships—being a wife or a girlfriend of a partner—we take on all these different roles but they’re always changing. Our jobs are always changing and evolving.
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Like A Mother: Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles
For the reader, it is the dedication before McSweeney’s first poem, “for my daughters,” that signals it is time to read.
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“If You Give a Story Something, It Gives It Back:” A Conversation with Morgan Talty
A writer isn’t in control of what’s on the page, the story is. But if you give a story something, it gives it back.
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Ephemera and Artifacts: A Conversation with Sejal Shah
So many stories are written for/about male heroes with a traditional, predictable plot. That’s not to say that I didn’t and don’t hope other people would read and be interested in these stories, but I wrote them first for myself.
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The Slow Melting of Faces: A Conversation with Maria Bamford
You could write about this weird thing, and people who like to read will be down to find out about this different world. It’s a very different situation in a nightclub or a theater.