Who Is the Bad Art Friend?
Art often draws inspiration from life—but what happens when it’s your life?
Writing Fiction
The Minor Regional Novelist
A profile of Pulitzer Prize- and Oscar-winning author Larry McMurtry.
A Brutally Honest Accounting of Writing, Money, and Motherhood
A secret hope of mine, which I now find hilarious: I imagined that once I had a child, I would become a faster writer. Faster, and also better. It’s hard for me to reconstruct the optimistic logic that led me to this hypothesis. I think I honestly believed that if I did not have the option to write badly, I would simply evolve, like that Lamarckian giraffe, into a more efficient creature.
Whatever Happened to ______?
When a writer’s husband became violent, her career threatened to vanish along with her safety.
Born to Run: Herman Melville's Great Escape
On Herman Melville’s literary career.
Mary Gaitskill and the Life Unseen
A profile of the writer.
Writing From the Black, Twitchy Place
A fiction/essay hybrid on the lies of storytelling.
</blockquote>“This stuff you don’t recall so much as suspect. Usually dark, not-so-nice things you think you could have witnessed, or had done to you, or – even worse — did unto others. Maybe there’s even a dim recollection – your cousin Johnny’s gray eyes with the bottom half flooded for instance, or your mother’s grim little smeared-lipstick smile, or the sound of your sister throwing up on the other side of the bathroom door. But really, these things are so shadowy and faint you can’t be certain of any part of them. You’d have forgotten these ghost-memories a long time ago were it not for one thing that seems completely unrelated and it’s this: there’s a dark and oversensitive stain on your heart.”</p></blockquote>
The George Saunders Interview
"For example, I remember reading Hemingway and loving his work so much—but then at some point, realizing that my then-current life (or parts of it) would not be representable via his prose style. Living in Amarillo, Texas, working as a groundsman at an apartment complex, with strippers for pals around the complex, goofball drunks recently laid off from the nuclear plant accosting me at night when I played in our comical country band, a certain quality of West Texas lunatic-speak I was hearing, full of way off-base dreams and aspirations—I just couldn’t hear that American in Hem-speak. And that kind of moment is gold for a young writer: the door starts to open, just a crack."
