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“Incest, 9/11, miscarriage, vehicular manslaughter—you’re thinking, now there’s a barrel of laughs”

“If literature is all about expanding our empathetic abilities, I’m most interested in doing that for difficult characters, characters who are most like the people we actually meet in the world: people who are flawed, sometimes deeply flawed. It’s easy to empathize with saints; it’s harder to empathize with sinners, but don’t we all have a little bit of both in us? My story, “Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When,” came out of my impatience with the Portraits of Grief series that the New York Times ran after 9/11. All those tiny narratives about victims’ lives painted each and every one of them as saints. Surely, I thought, there were people among the thousands who died who were not so saintly, perhaps even pretty horrible. Why do we feel like only the saintly can be mourned? So I wrote a story about a pretty horrible guy who dies on 9/11 and the way in which his wife and mistress try to figure out how to mourn him. The writer Uwem Akpan has said that “Literature allows us to sit for a while with people we’d rather not meet.” I couldn’t agree more. I don’t have to marry the guy from my story, but I think I’m better off if I try to understand him.”

Helena Fitzgerald on the transformative power of living alone as a woman.

“Loving someone else, and joining our life with theirs, asks us to sit down with the brutal facts of ourselves, to sift finely between what is true and what we wish were true, in order to understand what we need and what we can offer. Love is a stark accounting of oneself and one’s partner, wiping away excuses and avoidances, insisting on responsibility.”

Writer Chelsea Hodson discusses the quiet and often invisible work of writing, and what it means to reflect and document your own life through words.

Deleting my tweets one at a time was an education in self-loathing and shame—and 100-percent worth it.

Mountain Man's "Stella," from the new album, Magic Ship, out September 21, 2018. Download the song now when you pre-order the album: http://smarturl.it/Magic...

Is it too late to have the life I want?

"The more bound by routine, the freer I felt."

Early on in my MFA, I workshopped a chapter of my novel I had reworked several times already and thought was particularly strong. I was in the habit of workshopping writing I thought was good—I see…

If depression was the primary affect of Gen X, anxiety may be the definitive diagnosis for millennials.

“This age of anxiety did not begin with this presidency, nor does it end at the U.S. border, but there is something fundamentally Yankish about the culture of dogged, dead-eyed competition that produces it. It’s what happens when the American Dream becomes a nightmare you can’t wake from, and not just because you haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in years. It’s what happens when a society clings to a defining mythos that celebrates working until you drop, abhors poverty as evidence of moral failure, considers the provision of a basic safety net a pansy European affectation, and continues to call itself free.”

Writer Sierra Teller Ornelas explains how she got into writing for television, what it means to the only

Author Melissa Broder, the writer behind So Sad Today, talks about what it was like to compose her first novel—which she did mostly in her car.

“I know that I know nothing. I’m glad I know that. To me, beginner’s mind is the shit. I don’t have much certainty about the world or my opinions. I often see multiple sides of an issue, and I think it’s my best quality. Some say this indicates a weak constitution. That’s cool, because I’m mistrustful of people who are very certain. It may have something to do with a poet’s soul. In poetry, you don’t need to resolve anything. Disparate elements can coexist and create something awesome.”

<3

Last night, I had a really intense dream telling me that my (future) baby had begun his descent to the earth: I saw that it had been given a soul or had chosen a soul and was still very high up and far away, and that this process had begun seven months ago—I mean that seven months ago it had connected to my heart, as if a baby is born first, far in advance, in the mother’s heart. The vision was about to end when I desperately rushed to whatever oracle was making it clear, and asked if it was not too late to choose the path along which having this baby was possible. I was reassured that it was not.

“I SMOKED SOME POT to get rid of the tears. It’s a week before my period begins. Days ten and six and five and one before my period comes are the worst. The rest of the days aren’t so good, either.”

#heti/sheila

Writer and poet Jenny Zhang on writing to answer unanswerable questions, letting go of the idea of greatness, and the importance of building a trusted community.

Anyone laboring under the delusion that New York City is a progressive bastion need look no further than the city’s school system, which remains among the most segregated in the country.

A TCI reader wrote in asking how to deal with procrastination and fear of failure in regards to meeting their deadlines. We asked playwright Christopher Shinn to consider the question, and we gathered other thoughts from our archive.

“What makes much creative work so different from other ways of being—especially in our hyper-connected, technology-mediated era—is that it comes from the self. One is not reacting to external stimuli; the stimuli is internal. This is wholly at odds with how we operate during most of our waking hours.”

“If a deadline is really hard and fixed, rather than self-imposed, then you will just have to be content with creating something that is part art, part product.”

just, this whole thing.

from paris review

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