Kathryn Winograd on the Lyric Impulse: Blizzards, Bricks, and the...
Warned of, craved, the blizzard finally barrels across the ice dark street. The known world whittles down to black elm, chiseled hoar frost, and my breath against the slim windowpane, periodic circles...
View ArticleNaomi Washer: Not the Map but the Winding
The first poet I ever personally knew died a week before the launch of Ghost Proposal’s first issue. I am still trying to find the sense in that. It is an answer I may never find; the essay I will...
View ArticleChelsey Clammer: Body of Work, on Structure Courting Content
IntroductionWe learned this in school. Were force-fed the essay’s acceptable appearance, all our thoughts squeezed into five paragraphs. If/then statement. If we write within the standardized confines,...
View ArticleEric Fershtman: the last thing this essay needs is a name
The equivocation, the verbosity, the footnotes, the salmagundi of, like, obscure academic jargon and colloquialisms—the e.g.’s and i.e.’s and shucks, folks, and w/r/t’s and etc.’s, etc.—all speak to a...
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'Tigris! Tigris!' A Species Loneliness
On second thought, it might have been revelatory to witness a tiger. While in Bangladesh, I had convinced myself otherwise. To avoid disappointment? To temper entitlement? I return from Dhaka the day...
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Silas Hansen: On Teaching Comics in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom
Every creative writing teacher has their favorite thing to teach. People who know me well might guess that mine is Joan Didion’s “The White Album,” or one of the essays in Notes from No Man’s Land by...
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Nathaniel Rosenthalis: Notes on Sontag
1.Reading Susan Sontag makes me feel bossy. Arguing against any indifference to aesthetics or ethics, she is always in the middle of persuading me with her avidity, and sometimes her leaping is over...
View ArticleHallie Owen: Goodbye to All That, again and again
When did we stop being so young, Joan and I? Drawing parallels is a familiar pastime of mine and I’m pleased to find one where I can stand momentarily alongside Joan Didion. On one side: me, reading...
View ArticleGuest Editors Sarah Einstein and Silas Hansen on Brevity's Special Issue on...
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View ArticleSteve Wasserman on studiously ignoring what he's supposed to be reading
From: Steve WassermanDate: 7 March 2015 at 15:00To: Ander Monson and Craig ReinboldSubject: PITCH - The Essay That Wrote ItselfDear Ander and Craig,I'd like to write a thousand words springing from a...
View ArticleChing-In Chen: Queer interview series, part 3
This interview with Ching-In Chen is the third in a series on queerness, genre, and the essay. The first interview with Douglas A. Martin can be read here, and the second with Jackie Wang can be read...
View ArticleMatthew Vollmer on 21st Century Prose
21st CENTURY PROSE: WE LIKE WORDS AND VOICES AND THAT FOR WHICH WE HAVE NO NAME*Matthew Vollmer*I.It’s no secret that books are made of words. No writer or reader would dispute such a thing. The notion...
View ArticleNicole Walker: Breaking the Rules--Part 3. What You Don't Know
“Write what you know” is one of those rules that you are told in high school English classes during your short creative writing session. Sometimes, they’ll tell you it again in undergrad...
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The Essay Blinks: A Post-AWP Manifesto
Image by @sarolee17This year’s AWP Conference saw a trend in panels with titles like “Object and Subject: The Illustrated Book,” “Literature as Visual Art,” “Comics Confessional,” and “Teaching Graphic...
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There Are Places Like Home, Writing as Departure: An Interview with Bonnie...
Bonnie Friedman’s Surrendering Oz: A Life in Essays, was longlisted for the 2015 PEN award for the Art of the Essay and shorlisted for the 2015 CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction Writing....
View ArticleNina Boutsikaris on Sonora Review's Tiny CNF contest (May 15 deadline)
Petite and potent. That’s what Sonora Review’s flash nonfiction contest is all about. Thanks to my longtime obsession with succinct, tightly powerful writing (maybe to a fault), I’m drawn to almost...
View ArticleSheila Squillante: On using asterisks like bread crumbs
Both/And: Notes Toward a Multi-Genre Craft ClassI’ve just gotten my course assignment for the fall: The Craft of Creative Writing, which I am to teach as a multi-genre class, including both poetry and...
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Greg Wrenn: on writing for the future, and drawing the knife along the belly...
Reef AlbumLast month, packing up the last of my things in my childhood bedroom, I found an old album, its cardboard cover resembling snakeskin. Inside were photographs I had taken over twenty years ago...
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Visual Essayists V: Bianca Stone
S: I've just finished reading Antigonick (your collaboration with Anne Carson) for the second time and I’m interested in the story behind that project. I know that you took Carson’s collaboration class...
View ArticleQueer Essay Interviews: Maggie Nelson
This interview with Maggie Nelson is the fourth installment in a series about queerness, genre, and essays. Nelson is the author of a number of nonfiction and poetry books, including Bluets (Wave), The...
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