A helpful trick can be to picture feminine words (pumpkin latte, duvet cover) as butterflies. Soft, delicate, hard to catch, and useless except near flowers. Masculine words are more like knives.
Vi Khi Nao on her new novel Fish in Exile, why women shouldn't apologize (even when they're wrong), moving between genres, and why humor is vital in a novel full of darkness and grief.
Be it Latin or poetry, or whatever it was—I was feeling woozy by then. If I couldn’t love what I was reading, I took it, it was better to have never read at all.
(n.); artist’s studio or workshop; c. 1840, from the old French astelier (“carpenter’s workshop, woodpile”) “Part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction…
Elegant words from a manuscript painstakingly illustrated by a fifteenth-century scribe: “Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam.” Translation: “Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated…