Features & Reviews
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Writing About a Muslim Girl Who Can Contain Multitudes: A Conversation with Bushra Rehman
Teenagers are brilliant—you actually get duller as an adult . . .
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Navigating the Messy, the Scary, and the Beautiful: A conversation with Marisa Crane
I think humor is so important to who we are as people, how we deal with pain, how we connect with one another. It’s essential to my being and my writing.
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A Kind of Common Madness: A Conversation with Liz Harmer
Two huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession.
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Finding Freedom in the Absurd: Jesse Ball’s Autoportrait
From Ball’s absurdist perspective, leaning into the world’s inherent purposelessness isn’t about embracing mortality. It’s about embracing complete obliteration.
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A Conversation with Daisuke Shen and Vi Khi Nao About their Collaborative Novella, Funeral
Writing started feeling interesting again, like it was worth it after all, and not just a boring thing that ate ham sandwiches on white bread for every meal and whose favorite book from last year was [Redacted] by [Famous author],…
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Inventing the Form of Yourself: A conversation with Maggie Millner
I have great affection for writers who come into their queerness after they’ve already written books . . .
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Another Oracle: Lynn Xu’s Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Light
Almost ten years have passed since Lynn Xu’s debut, the luminous Debts & Lessons, introduced us to her oracle. “Let it not be for what you write, the world / I mean,” opens one of the collection’s signature center-justified poems,…
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Connecting Our Past to Our Present: An Interview With Jamila Minnicks
Within true community, we can experience our deepest vulnerabilities because we know that we are safe to fail, encouraged to thrive, and needed to be part of something greater than our little selves.
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Balancing the Heart and Mind: Ryan Lee Wong’s Which Side Are You On
Which Side Are You On is a novel both of the heart and the mind: one that makes you think and question your perception of the world and your place in it, and feel deeply and fervently about what matters…
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A rush of joy from complete strangers: An interview with Monica Macansantos
I think that it’s helpful to imagine your own people as your primary audience even when you are also writing for an audience that doesn’t necessarily belong to this community.
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What Is a Person?: Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow
Safety requires setting up clear boundaries, but a restricted life is lonely and isolating and often impossible to bear.
