The Burden of Being Real: Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special
To see oneself and one’s people as real: this is the only way out of the shadow of the special.
Features & Reviews
9273 posts
The In-Between-ness of Things: An Interview with David Groff
What would it mean to embrace being generative? To have a different way of taking on a responsibility for creating more life on the planet?
Twenty-five Years Unbound: Reading a Book of AIDS
The range of prepositions used here in writing about how to write AIDS is indicative of the range of questions encompassed by the book, the range of the “brutal presence” of the disease.
Inherent Violence: A Conversation with Rita Chang-Eppig
I knew I wanted to be deliberately vague, as to whether something was actually happening. For many people across the world and across time periods, there isn’t always this strong delineation between fantasy and reality.
On abandoning words: Carlos Fonseca’s Austral
Hidden within all these constellations and labyrinths of philosophy is a love story and a story about the struggle of a writer to find meaning in words.
The World is a Shitting Bird: A Conversation with Emilie Moorhouse
She mocked beauty standards and even the condescending tone they had when advising women on how to behave “nicely.” So she obviously did have certain strong leanings.
The Presence in Absences: A Conversation with Gina Chung
The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.
Killing One to Save Many: Javier Marías’s Tomás Nevinson
Marías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.
“Actually, I’m Not Grateful”: A Conversation with Stephanie Foo
I found myself as a potential representative of a larger group, which had no representative. There wasn’t a first-person story about Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, so I thought, “I know how to do this.”
Confession of Grief: Katie Marya’s Sugar Work
Marya’s work is a slow burn; both sweet and salty, that picks up speed and ferocity as it unfolds.
I Become More Animal When I’m Grieving: A Conversation with Jenny Sadre-Orafai
So much of being a poet and a writer is also about exploration.
Imagining a Worst-Case Scenario: John Vaillant’s Fire Weather
The boreal forests around the town do habitually burn, and its residents were used to seeing flames over their skies in summer months.