Embodied Writing: Breathe, Breathe, Breathe
The author of Us From Nothing offers an exercise to enhance the body’s role in the act of writing.
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Craft Capsules
In our weekly series of craft essays, some of the best and brightest minds in contemporary literature explore their craft in compact form, articulating their thoughts about creative obsessions and curiosities in a working notebook of lessons about the art of writing.
Embodied Writing: Our Spider-Senses
The author of Us From Nothing offers an exercise to become mindful of the body’s role in the act of writing.
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Embodied Writing: One Body, Many Parts
The author of Us From Nothing revises his thinking about the role of the body in writing.
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Nonfiction as Writing Companion
The author of Freedom Is a Feast examines the inspirational power of real-life events.
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Desire, Physicality, Contradiction
The author of Freedom Is a Feast explores tactics for creating compelling, human, three-dimensional characters.
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Food and Fiction
The author of Freedom Is a Feast considers cuisine and its place in fictional narratives.
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The Power of Nerding Out
The author of Anyone’s Ghost contemplates the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and how it has influenced his writing life.
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On the Uses of Observation
The author of Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts From a Dakota Garden considers the importance of paying careful attention in writing.
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How Prewriting Can Invigorate Your Work
The author of Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts From a Dakota Garden reflects on how a practice of free-writing can help writers uncover hidden truths.
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Mind the (Memory) Gap
The author of First Love: Essays on Friendship explores ways to handle lost memories in memoir.
It Gets Fun Again, I Promise
The author of First Love: Essays on Friendship has advice for authors who’ve lost their literary momentum.
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What Songwriters Can Teach Us About Storytelling
The author of I’ll Give You a Reason considers what short fiction writers can learn from popular songs.
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The Comedy of Short Fiction
The author of I’ll Give You a Reason contemplates the common ground between a joke and a short story.
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On Person and Place
The author of I’ll Give You a Reason explores how setting shapes characters.
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To Use or Not to Use First Person
The author of Short War offers some perspective on whether a first person narrator can enhance or inhibit a story.
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Why Not Go Nuts? On Research
The author of Short War ponders the ways research can deepen a fiction project—and how to know when enough is enough.
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Familiar Characters
The author of Short War contemplates the rewards of modeling minor characters on real people.
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Truth in Tucson: On Translating Family Into Poetry
The author of Yaguareté White explores the poetic art of balancing fact and fiction.
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Copy and Paste: On Poetic Theft
The author of Yaguareté White considers the ethics of found poetry.
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Naming the Apophatic: The Poetics of Not Knowing
The author of Yaguareté White contemplates how to approach writing in multiple languages.
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Crayoned Fire: In Praise of Book-Length Poems
The author of Midwhistle explores the power of the epic poem.
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What Herbie Hancock Taught Me About Formal Poetry
The author of Midwhistle contemplates the common ground between jazz music and poetry.
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Approaches to Titling Your Poem
The author of Midwhistle considers how a poem’s title can frame, deepen, or complicate the reader’s experience of it.
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Family Stories: Alternatives for Load-Bearing Clichés
The author of Family Family explores why tired tropes proliferate in fiction—and how to avoid them.
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Finding Your Crow
The author of fox woman get out! considers authenticity and how to find one’s authentic voice.
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