The Millions
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Private Belief vs. Public Art
For The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone explores Eyewear Publishing’s new anthology, The Poet’s Quest for God, and explains why poets “need God”: How do we discern a writer’s religious beliefs? When does the private belief inform the public art? When it comes to…
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A Brief Relationship with Writing
At The Millions, Bryan VanDyke reflects on his experience writing several unpublished novels, and how these manuscripts helped motivate him to write the draft of his first published work in less than a week: My grad school mentor, the brooding and…
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The Existential Crises of Writers
Writers experience all sorts of anxieties and doubts, such that many find themselves taking a spiraling descent into the worst existential crises. No writer should feel alone in this—over at The Millions, Robert Fay writes about the many writers who…
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How to Write Wilderness
At The Millions, Mary Catherine Martin responds to the flaws she found in Dave Eggers’s representation of the Alaskan wilderness in his most recent novel, Heroes of the Frontier. She explains why writers who “write wilderness” have a responsibility to understand…
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Portman’s Pen Pals
Apparently, Jonathan Safran Foer wasn’t the only one exchanging emails with Natalie Portman. At The Millions, Jacob Lambert shares excerpts from the supposed epistolary relationship between the actress and no less than American author Cormac McCarthy.
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Computer Programs Make Good Writing Buddies
For The Millions, Philip Hopkins shares what he learned after attempting to co-author a book with a computer program. Through the experience, Hopkins ultimately concludes that “the gap between simple self-awareness and the literary intelligence necessary to compose a worthwhile novel…
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Wild Water Kingdom
If anything, the private spaces of the Monterey Bay Aquarium are even more magical that the public ones. The exact same aesthetic sensibility that pervades the viewing galleries—clean, calm, scientifically sound, technologically advanced—also characterizes the service corridors, which is nice…
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The Desire for Distraction
For The Millions, Mike Broida revisits David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, arguing that the work’s claims about addiction and the media presaged the influence of “television culture” on the digital age: The final “joke” of Infinite Jest is that the book is intended to…
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Writers Who Burn Their Own Work
We burn old love letters and photographs to be reborn. The action of burning is often a process. Find a match or a lighter. Put the papers in a container or can or shove them in a fireplace. There are…
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Literary Cage Match
At The Millions, Jonathan Gottschall compares his experience learning to cage fight with the struggles of being a writer, as “the writing game, like the fighting game, mostly ends in breakage”: Literary history is a history of victors. So stories about the struggles…
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Admit It! You’re A Writer
For The Millions, Marcia DeSanctis shares how she learned to become a “second-career writer” after resisting her literary ambitions while working as a television news producer: A stifled artist was scratching through all of my work identities, and though my jobs…
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Unstuck in Time
Despite its uncanny salience in the context of this most recent wave of social injustice and protest, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was written well before the #BlackLivesMatter movement began. Far from a coincidence, the book’s resonance is a product of…