Leslie Jamison
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Measuring Emotion
At Lit Hub, a former student talks with Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, about expressions of emotion in personal essays and why “confession and sentimentality [are] taboo.” For Jamison, the investigation of writing emotion began in her MFA…
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The Rumpus Interview with Meghan Daum and Elliott Holt
Meghan Daum, the anthology’s editor, and Elliott Holt, who contributed its penultimate essay, discuss Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed.
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The Rumpus Interview with Karen Salyer McElmurray
Karen Salyer McElmurray talks about academia, the relationship between flaws and perfection, writing memoir, and the “tapestry” of writers who inspire her.
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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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The Day Jobs That Influence Our Writing
At the New York Times, writers Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison explain how their past jobs—at a morgue and in kitchens—have taught them about writing: But it was another truth — the humility of that kitchen, confronting what I didn’t…
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How Soon Is Too Soon?
Leslie Jamison and Benjamin Moser tackle a long-debated question for the Bookends column: “Should There Be a Minimum Age for Writing a Memoir?”. They both agree there isn’t—you can read their reasoning over at the New York Times.
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This Week in Short Fiction: A Guide to AWP
It’s that time of year again, where writers young and old, from all corners of the country, come to congregate in one gigantic, frenetic, neurotic, alcohol-infused crowd, in a couple of fancy hotels no one can really afford, to stay…
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An “I” for an “I”
For a growing number of essayists, memoirists, and other wielders of the unwieldy “I,” confessional has become an unwelcome label—an implicit accusation of excessive self-absorption, of writing not just about oneself but for oneself. Over at the Atlantic, Leslie Jamison argues that personal…
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Notable NYC: 3/14–3/20
Saturday 3/14: Mike Lala, Dolan Morgan, Allyson Paty, Haleh Roshan Stilwell, Jacob Perkins, Matt Nelson, Alain Stamatis, and Kalliopi Mathios celebrate mouth tattoos. Mellow Pages Library, 7 p.m., free. Asha Sasha John and Xeňa Stanislavovna Semjonová join the Segue Series.…
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The Unhappy Marriage Rule
For the New York Times‘s Bookends column, authors Charles McGrath and Leslie Jamison share their thoughts about what they perceive to be the best portrayals of marriage in literature. While McGrath argues that the more interesting literary marriages tend to be unhappy…
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A Mélange of Loafing and Looking
In Leslie Jamison’s introduction to a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days & Collect, excerpted over at Slate, the word “specimen” is rescued from its isolating, clinical connotations, instead becoming realigned with Whitman’s vision of abundance and celebration. Jamison recounts…
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Writing the Invisible
The work of the writer has always been about making the invisible visible. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, talks to Salon about Ferguson and fear, selfies and tattoos, and what it means to be a writer in the…