How Wonderful It Is to Be So Moved: A Conversation with Sarah Krasnostein
The most truthful we can be in a factual genre is to doubt the attainability of fact at all.
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Posts Tagged: John McPhee
What to Read When You Want to Curl Up with a Good Book
Rumpus editors share their favorite winter reads.
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What to Read When It’s Time for Sports
Just a “heads up” (as they say in the sports world): this isn’t your average sports list.
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The Rumpus Interview with Erik Kennedy
Poet Erik Kennedy discusses literary community and his formative years as a young writer in New Jersey, and shares two new prose poems.
...moreStructure as Lightning Rod
Writing for The Millions, M.C. Mah turns over all the cards in the deck on structure in storytelling. He gathers words of wisdom—and many metaphors—from luminaries like John McPhee, Borges, Vonnegut, and George Saunders, and then links the contemporary “horoscopic style” of structuring to an “anxiety about a better way to tell a story…” possibly […]
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“Throw Something Down Hard Enough, You Discover Its Laws”
Maybe my faith that the profoundest feeling we’re offered by art that really hits us deep in is a setting free, a series of screens or horizons obliterated somehow lovingly.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Chaitali Sen
Swati Khurana talks to the author of The Pathless Sky, a love story centered around place, the state’s authority, statelessness, and geology.
...moreMaking the Cut
In writing, what is not said can be just as important as what is. Over at the New Yorker, John McPhee discusses the art of choosing what to include and what to omit from a piece: Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from […]
...moreA Sincere Mustache
In some piece or other, early on, I said of a person I was writing about that he had a “sincere” mustache. This brought Bingham, manuscript in hand, out of his office and down the hall to mine, as I had hoped it would. A sincere mustache, Mr. McPhee, a sincere mustache? What does that […]
...moreThe Fossils of Storytelling
For the New Yorker, John McPhee writes about our dwindling frames of references: Frames of reference are like the constellation of lights, some of them blinking, on an airliner descending toward an airport at night. You see the lights. They imply a structure you can’t see. Inside that frame of reference—those descending lights—is a big airplane with […]
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