Afsheen Farhadi
“My first stories for my introductory and intermediate workshops were written on this machine, as were my first attempts at novels, using a keyboard whose particular clicks and clacks became wedded to the experience.
Writers Recommend
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
chaun webster
“go outside. if it is warm enough, take the okra seeds from the water—their husks just softened—and put them in the soil.
Kwoya Fagin Maples
“When I feel too close to the work, so close I can’t see it, it’s time we take a break.
Marta Pérez-Carbonell
“I have seen, with my mind’s eye, some of the most relevant images for my stories when walking, running, and swimming.
Megan Gannon
“Now in middle age, I see I’m no self-possessed sage sitting in my garden, sundressed and hairbrushed, eating berries dipped in cream with clean fingers; I’m a small, petty troll snatching at beauty and munching its wings between mossy teeth.
Cameron Awkward-Rich
“Coming unstuck in my writing requires various strategies of self-amplification, ways of creating the conditions in which I can listen to me and not only to you.
Eleni Sikelianos
“I’ve come to understand that we need to tend to the living weave of thought and feeling that becomes writing, just as we tend to other things we want to keep alive, like children and plants.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Each pencil feels like perhaps it is okay to linger, to listen, to get a line wrong—and try again.
Woody Brown
“Routine may sound monotonous if you’ve never lived that way, but I find it productive and liberating.
Maya Salameh
“Sometimes the poem doesn’t need proof. Sometimes it just needs a whisper, or a creature no one can quite name.