A Conversation with Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton
When I first heard about Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, I fell in love. I couldn’t hear enough about the anthology. I scoured the internet for scraps of...
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Mysteries Provoke Me: a Conversation with Lia Purpura
Lia Purpura is one of my favorite essayists and people, so the occasion of the release of her fourth book of essays, All the Fierce Tethers, this last spring was an opportunity for anticipation. It's a...
View ArticleKati Standefer on How To Write “Craziness”
Outside the window of my room at the Carey Institute for Global Good, the snow stretched out into a field of white, the Catskills unfolding in the distance whenever the weather cleared enough to see...
View ArticleLiving By—or Against—the Stories I Read: Randon Billings Noble in...
We’re collecting whether we want to or not. In this case, I mean that we are hardwired to to the work of assembling meaning: creating Venn diagrams between every two objects we put against each other....
View ArticleTalking trans writing and Ryka Aoki's "Raccoon" with Oliver Baez Bendorf
I was glad to chat with Oliver Baez Bendorf for this series on essays and essay-like things like by trans writers. For our conversation, I asked Bendorf to select a short piece by another writer that...
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What's in Dolls: a Conversation with Susan Neville
Nine years ago this week, Allie Leach, one of the then-new students at the MFA program where I had just taken a job, came up to me raving about Susan Neville. Did I know her work? I didn't, I had to...
View ArticleSarah Fawn Montgomery: (Dis)Ableing the Creative Writing Workshop
The first of an on-going series on improving the nonfiction workshop & essay pedagogy; find managing editor Will Slattery's information in the sidebar if you'd like to be a part of the series.“Even...
View ArticleNatalie Villacorta: the Right Amount of Real
“I find I can listen to talk radio in a way that I can’t abide the network news—the sound of human voices waking before they drown,” David Shields wrote in Reality Hunger. Though the book was published...
View ArticleKay Keegan: 11 Commandments of Workshop
Improv comedy is all about listening and collaborating with fellow players on stage, which seems eerily similar to the standard workshop model many of us are familiar with. Del Close, founder of the...
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**Int'l Essayists** Marcela Sulak on The horrific Stranger and the Self: Two...
Israeli publishing houses and literary journals don’t usually distinguish between literary fiction and literary nonfiction—it’s all simply prose. Possibly a greater distinction would be made between...
View ArticleZoë Bossiere: A Student-Centered Approach to the Creative Writing Workshop
As a discipline, creative writing has only been taught in the academy for about a hundred years, and during that time not a whole lot has changed. The first workshop class I took as an undergraduate...
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Sarah Minor: Towards Another Video Essay
Today I have been considering the “hot dog” button on my microwave. I find this button engaging because my microwave is the first I have ever owned and, as the button makes obvious, I don’t actually...
View ArticleSusannah Q. Pratt: How Zadie Smith Saved My Book
Packing to leave for a week of uninterrupted writing and reading, I found myself in my office evaluating the books on my shelves. I was headed to the former summer estate of a once-famous architect,...
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Jay Ponteri on Sarah Vap’s WINTER: DEVOTIONS AND EFFULGENCES
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View ArticleGreg Gerke: Davenport as Exemplar
The essays of Guy Davenport collected in The Geography of the Imagination, Every Force Evolves a Form, and The Hunter Gracchus are more than guilty pleasures for me. They discuss dense things but are...
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The Malcontent: Keep Essays Weird
Dear Readers,If you've been with us a while, you know that one of our recurring features is The Malcontent, in which we invite writers to put on the black hat, be a villain, embrace their dark sides,...
View ArticleKathleen Melin: TEACHING IN THE TIME OF TR**P
When the creative non-fiction class I’d be teaching in our rural community filled to overflowing, I hopped to the copy shop and printed another run of short pieces we’d use as examples. A few years...
View ArticleAdvent 2019 / What will happen on December 21st, 2019
Dear readers: you may notice that this year, we've chosen to forgo our advent calendar. Instead, we'll be doing our usual weekly posts and focusing our attention on the run-up to What Happened on...
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Beth Peterson, "Back to the Beginning of the Collection"
In 2009, I began writing a book about disappearance. I was living on the edge of a quickly-receding glacier: snowfields dissolving, small ponds and then lakes appearing in the place where the ice had...
View ArticleMatthew Vollmer: On the Enduring Power of E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake”
When I asked my friend Kevin Moffett, author of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, if he had any suggestions about the kinds of essays I should assign for a Creative Nonfiction class, he...
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