Over at The Millions, Hannah Gersen interviews Lauren Collins about her memoir, When in French; learning a foreign language; and writing about herself. As Collins recalls: I wanted to describe the terrain of French, the kind of landscape and its physical features and its hills and valleys. I was thinking of it that way. To […]
...moreBook titles are an essential component of the texts they gesture at. They’re also advertising. At Catapult, Hannah Gersen recounts the naming process for her novel Home Field: A short story title can be fanciful or obscure or may even contribute something important to the meaning of the story, but a book title needs to have a […]
...moreFor The Millions, Hannah Gersen recalls past attempts to read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and explains why she came up short. The essay also serves as an announcement for a new series, in which Gersen will once again attempt to tackle Proust and write monthly posts about her impressions.
...moreRecently, it has become fashionable to debate the pros and cons of pursuing a MFA. However, for the Millions, Hannah Gersen suggests that this debate has steered the conversation away from a more difficult question: how do we support writers who do not have the means to pursue graduate degrees? For some writers, getting an M.F.A. […]
...moreFor The Millions, Hannah Gersen shares the visual aid she used to construct her novel and asks other writers about their own: I got curious about the other visual aids that novelists create to manage their books, so I asked around and gathered a variety of notebook pages, diagrams, and timelines. In my search for […]
...moreJust to throw out a few other Daum-isms—here’s her description of Anthropologie: “A twirling motion in the form of an international brand”. Of Los Angeles: “a place where wildness and domestication are forever running into each other.” Of Nicole Kidman: “a walking Vermeer.” She’s pithy like a newspaper columnist needs to be, but she doesn’t […]
...moreBefore giving birth to her first child, Hannah Gersen had hoped to find an anthology of birth stories. At The Millions, Gersen writes that Labor Day is just what she was seeking, though she didn’t discover it until after she had given birth. But she found that reading this anthology after giving birth may have been even “more helpful” than it […]
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