Writers and Writings

She calls it reading iconically. Which is to say, Jessica Hooten Wilson approaches literature like an icon, an object that itself can be beautiful but points toward something else. That’s what she wr…

From the introduction of his new book: “We enter the bookstore, see all the books arrayed there, and think: so many books, so little time; but the truth goes the other way: books do not take time, th…

Maybe, when you fantasize about your writing life, you picture a quill pen and scrolling parchment. But probably not. More than likely, you think about the machine that still stars in almost every no…

Romanticism gave the writing world its share of luminaries. Poe, Dickinson, Wadsworth. But despite its good reads, the movement also left us some poor assumptions about the nature of writing itself. …

I like them. I work on them, and I read them. Because there’s a certain magic to the way a magazine is more than just words or just pictures. It’s not just an aesthetic: a magazine can host a whole c…

Picture this: Drawing and writing a full-page, stand-alone comic strip every week, doing commissioned illustrations for children’s books, and publishing more comics in places like the New Yorker, all…

There’s a saying that goes like this: The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates, right? As often as that idea gets batted around, though, the big questions about life — why are we here? what …

We really only have two choices: We either go home or we go somewhere else. For a good percentage of educated, upwardly mobile Americans, the default choice seems to be to leave. But why? And, more i…

In the pages of America’s papers and magazines, Roosevelt Montás has stirred up a debate. These so-called great books, what do they really offer society? And to *which part* of society, exactly?

You meet two kinds of readers: Those with a cultish devotion to the writing of Wendell Berry and those who haven’t read it (or read it carefully). Okay, both of those are extremes. But barely.

You’ll hear writers claim to write in order to discover something. Or just to emote. You don’t hear as much about — not with fiction, at least, and not outside scare quotes — storytelling with an age…

Books end, of course, and most fiction stories, too. But real-life stories don’t. For a writer — particularly the memoirist — this poses questions about where and how a literary project begins and en…

To talk about food — or to write about it — is to discuss nearly every part of our culture. Geography. History. Economics and politics, too. So when you talk to the author of one of the most acclaime…

In the fog of his dad’s suicide, my friend Craig tried to get lost in G.K. Chesterton’s nightmare, The Man Who Was Thursday. Instead, he found his way back to reality.

No writer writes enough. That’s why these two poets initiated an aggressive, substantial project to write an original poem every day.