personal essay
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Language and Exile
Over at the New Yorker, writer Jhumpa Lahiri has written a hauntingly beautiful personal essay about learning Italian, leaving English, and finding her voice in linguistic exile: How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine?…
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Language, Love, and Loss
Over at The Toast, Nicole Chung has written a deeply personal and beautiful essay about coming to terms with her adoption, embracing her Korean heritage, and learning her mother tongue alongside her daughter: When I watch my daughter writing in…
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Valeria Luiselli’s Book Club at the Jumex Factory
To write her new novel, The Story of My Teeth, Valeria Luiselli got ongoing book club feedback from workers at the Jumex factory featured in the novel. Over at Broadly, Luiselli talks to Lauren Oyler about her process, a childhood…
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Getting Personal
In response to Slate’s viral article about the rise of the “harrowing personal essay,” prominent editors from different publications weigh in on the importance of confessional writing, reasons for its gender divide, and the publishing process behind it.
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Writing and Collecting
When I left the house on Pace Street and moved to Vermont, I became a writer. I became a writer because I was so broken down by early motherhood that I stopped fearing criticism long enough to throw my work…
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LeBron James as Personal Essayist
Beneath all personal essays, especially those that deal with trauma, a change, or, in James’s case, a tough decision, the implicit narrative is that the author is presently in a clear enough place to produce the prose.
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Grant Snider’s favorite things, in rhyme. In The Last Book I Loved, Richard Kramer delves into the “determined and effective” Judith Schneiderman’s memoir, I Sang To Survive. A “propulsive drive” lies behind the Auschwitz survivor’s writing. “What I love…
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Megan Stielstra
I made work in any little spare minute I could… Everything was scattered and all over the place, and the question was: how can you grab this moment and live it as hard as you possibly can?
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For Lack of Anything Better
The curse of being a writer is knowing other people. I need other people (to write about) but I can’t handle other people (the way I can literary characters).
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Properly Blootered
The New Republic has taken the task of dissecting our collective drunkenness; or at least the words we’ve used to describe it: There seems to be a universal trend to avoid stating the obvious. To describe someone as simply drunk, in…
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Writing Blind
Writing and revising can be challenging under the best of circumstances, but imaging being unable to see the words on the page. At The Airship Daily, Tammy Ruggles writes about her life as a visually impaired writer: Before the computer…
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Letting the Story Surprise You
As part of their series on the craft of non-fiction and the personal essay, Michael Steinberg discusses the struggles and surprises of writing his memoir in the Tri-Quarterly Review. As I kept going, there were times when it felt like…