E.V. De Cleyre
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Consider the Weather
These are not stories about the weather, these are stories about life and death. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre considers the importance of weather in the works of Kathryn Schulz, Anthony Doerr, and Claire Vaye Watkins.
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Dissecting the Essay
How does an essay comes to its final shape? What’s the morphology of nonfiction’s popular form? Over at the Ploughshares blog, E. V. De Cleyre dissects works by Ander Monson, Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson to get…
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An End Has a Start
At the Ploughshares blog, E. V. De Cleyre considers the many ways to find the right moment to end a nonfiction story: The aftermath, Cusk writes, is “life with knowledge of what has gone before.” Writers are not seers. Armed with…
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The Antithesis of Context
e.v. de cleyre, writing for Ploughshares, offers a look at the art of omission from Rankine to Fitzgerald: what it means to omit something from the story, whether it be context or framework, and the implications of that omission on…
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A Body of Writing
The body in writing is a vessel to feeling—to empathy. Reading Lidia Yuknavitch, Maggie Nelson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others, is to feel. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre considers the presence of the body in writing, focusing on…
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The Way You Write
Using the second person is a tricky but effective writing device, though its use is pretty uncommon. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre offers some clever examples of writing in the second person.
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Notes on Craft
“Craft” is a fluid term; used in aeronautics and astronautics to speak of a single vessel, or the skill of deception, or a verb analogous to “make.” Craft in literature is comprised of narrative elements and literary devices: the nuts…
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Repeating Death
Placed after a mention of death or dying, Kurt Vonnegut’s “So it goes” refrain throughout Slaughterhouse Five utilizes repetition to explore the inevitability of death. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre considers how Kurt Vonnegut uses repetition in relation…