Nora Ephron said, “Everything is copy.” But in a memoir, much like in reality TV, art cannot represent life exactly. People are characters, snapshots of their “real” selves.
With every step, I realized I didn’t have to be juggling All The Things to be a worthwhile member of society. I just needed to exist.
Even on my worst day as a writer, I’m closer to the creative life I dreamed of at eighteen than ever before.
The years I suppressed my queerness are a loss that I'm exploring and grieving—if only through fiction.
I previously had no concept of what it was like to be a victim of your troubled mind.
As a way to cope with rejection, I often repeated to myself: Focus on the work rather than the results.
We have the right to imagine what is possible beyond the systems that try to destroy us. Black and queer writers have long imagined worlds beyond this one.
For all her various contrived public personas and her possibly manufactured cult following, Taylor Swift is a modern day poet.
“The book is not straightforward, but it is expansive, and I don’t think the only way to make a story cohere is chronology.”
On the value of understanding the kind of ecosystem that will support and sustain the flourishing of our lives, on and off the page.
“If you pick up a crystal and suddenly your writer’s block is gone, it’s not the crystal—it’s you using an object to allow yourself to think differently.”
“Linking climate action and environmental protection to social justice action is essential. It is still possible to hope.”
“I was grateful for the beauty and for the reminders that there are seasons; that things change gradually and also suddenly.”
Nina Boutsikaris, Jessica Gross, Sarah Minor, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Tyrese Coleman, and Noam Dorr chat about what they’ve learned—and wish they’d known—about publishing with a small indie press.
“There were awkward motel and Airbnb moments involving my dog and other people’s pets. But I’m glad I have a record of those, even if I wasn't able to elevate them into art.”
“I feel such rage—and it clarified what is important to me and what I want to write about.”
In fiction, you can feel good about resistance without actually resisting anything.
The details of those poems may be his first inkling that I know what he did.
It turns out all I want to find in literature, whether I write or read it, is a little piece of myself.
People have sex. Women have sex. It would feel irresponsible to censor or smooth over this part of their (and our) lives.
