Finding Enchantment in the Ordinary: A Conversation with Meng Jin
The reason why so many of these stories have metafictional elements is that I was trying to write in an ethical way while feeling like a professional liar.
Features & Reviews
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Sketch Book Reviews: Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
EMBRACE FEARLESSLY THE BURNING EARTH . . . is a quintessential Barry Lopez book. It is a clarion call to lovers of the earth, but one full of hope and optimism. This is exactly the kind of book we should all be reading right now.
Love in and Loving Lisa Dordal’s Water Lessons
If I didn’t already write poems, Lisa Dordal’s Water Lessons would make me want to write them.
Sustaining our Creative Practice: An Interview with May-lee Chai
Writing is what sustains me and gets me through. It’s the one place where we have control, and even if terrible things happen, it's not someone else making the terrible things happen.
The Imprint of a Mind: Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra
This sparse book, “an essay on pregnancy and earthquakes,” deals with the author’s dueling fears of recent and future earthquakes and her impending childbirth.
A void that migrates to the surface: An Interview with Juliet Patterson
That was my singular personal motivation for doing any of this work: to prevent the threat that this might happen to me. I naïvely believed that my parents would not die by their own hand because they had suffered as children of parents who had already died that way.
To Write the Way We Live: A Conversation with Jonathan Escoffery
I see myself as a story writer, and that's just the best thing ever.
Glimpses of Peace Only in Dreams: Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees
There’s a war on, and Sergey Sergeyich is worried about his bees.
Knowledge alters things forever: A conversation with Anuradha Roy
. . . it was clear in my head that the dog in the book would not die, that he would bring people together, and also function as a kind of barometer for good and evil because, in my experience, that is how dogs are.
A Collection of Hours: Look Here by Ana Kinsella
Reading about flânerie is a “useful” thing for me to do: useful for my career, for my scholarly ambitions. Actually partaking in flânerie is rarely useful in these ways
The Dream Does What It Wants: Talking with David Santos Donaldson
. . . I advise any fiction writer who can afford it, to an get a Jungian analyst . . .
What to Read When You Wish You Were Heading Back-to-School
The Rumpus editors put together a list of books for Virgo season