Search
-
July 26, 2016Women's Covers and Male Privilege
The default look for works of literary fiction, especially those written by women, was once this: “A stock image of a woman with her back to the camera, gazing over a shoreline.”(Or a tree. Or a field. ...
-
September 27, 2018You’re Going the Right Way. It’s Just a Really, Really Long Way.
I’m often asked by aspiring writers, “How did you become an author?” or “How did you get into the publishing world?”I used to think this was a really tough question. Because of course there’s ...
-
May 28, 2020
Something on race.
I had planned to post something on race. I was going to look at how it has affected me, including the friendships I have (and don’t have) today in real life. I was going to explore race in story and ...
-
November 12, 2019
Keeping Momentum
After the initial idea for a story is grounded, but before there’s enough material for real revisions and edits, writers are somehow expected to get words on the page. This is intimidating! Here a couple ...
-
November 07, 2019
Where Ideas Begin
Questions every writer is familiar with: “Where did you get the idea?” or “How did you decide what to write about?”How did Denis Johnson decide to make a character obsessed with Elvis Presley’s ...
-
November 23, 2019Getting Over Getting Stuck
That Tiny Life, the title story of my collection, is about family—about distance that grows between families over time. I can tell you that now because the story is written. Writing it, I didn’t know ...
-
November 19, 2019Revision Part Two, Long Projects
Short stories, essays, or poems are wonderful to revise—I say this while I’m revising a longer project, but story length does make a difference. You can reading through a short draft in an afternoon, ...
-
November 29, 2019
Fiction, Memory, and Family
I reread books, often because a story or scene moved me and I want to know how the writer engineered it. It’s exciting to flip back to the first page and say, “of course! Of course the story ends ...
-
August 31, 2022"They are Warriors, They Bear Witness" September Writer in Residence Martha Bátiz on the Women Who Fill Her New Story Collection
The stories in Martha Bátiz's No Stars in the Sky (House of Anansi Press) are painfully, urgently timely, exploring the objectification and oppression women experience as their rights, bodies, and ...
-
July 08, 2016To the Moons, Alice
Earlier this week, on July 4, NASA announced that the spacecraft Juno had successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit. That it did so on Independence Day, and that NASA used the term “Mighty Jupiter” in ...
