Reimagining Place: Setting as Convergence
A novelist explores the craft of imagining a fictional setting based on a real-world location that holds a capacity for convergence, a place where many threads intersect and many stories are born.
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Article Archive: The Literary Life
Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
The Value of Our Work: What Writers Can Learn From the Harvard Business School
An author who worked for years as a scribe at the Harvard Business School shares the lessons she learned that can be applied to writing, most notably: Believe that what you do is valuable.
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A Strong and Simple “I Must”: Rebuilding Confidence in the Wake of an Agent Breakup
After an unexpected split from her longtime agent, an author reconnects with her sense of calling and remembers who she writes for: herself.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a sparrow poem, a story about the loss of self during a period of social upheaval, or a series of vignettes that look back on several past jobs you’ve had.
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9,131 Sentences: How One Enormous Spreadsheet Taught Me to Be a Better Writer
Writing a book is a daunting challenge—but the texts we know and love can help. A nonfiction writer describes how a methodically organized spreadsheet of favorite quotes aided her journey from proposal to finished memoir.
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In the Shadow of a Homeplace: One Writer’s Life in Mississippi
A Nigerian professor and fiction writer describes how a new place like Starkville, Mississippi, becomes a home and how the color, texture, and form of her surroundings make their way into her storytelling.
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The Author’s Wife Is Also an Author: On the Fantasy and Reality of Writing and Partnership
A writer discusses the impact of perceived literary success on her marriage to another writer, drawing attention to the domestic and quotidian labor behind the privilege of being able to pursue one’s creative dreams.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem that creates unexpected connections, a story from the point of view of someone older than you, or a pair of lyrical essays that explore your personal responses to losses and gains.
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On Discomfort: The Creative Gift of Being Out of Your Depth
A novelist describes her exposure to a multitude of scientific disciplines as the writer-in-residence at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and shares how exploring something completely new has lent fresh energy to her work.
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The Ungrateful Stranger: Whose Story Deserves Welcome?
An immigrant novelist reflects on the opportunities extended to her by the American publishing industry—and challenges the notion that she should be grateful to be given any kind of welcome.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem that uses the language of flowers to share a secret, a scene where a young person expresses their thoughts about a parental figure, or an essay based on the logic of your own dreams.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem that uses the metaphor of a bridge to represent a complex family dynamic, a short story that reconceptualizes historical fiction, or a lyrical essay that reflects on the stages of returning to a former self.
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Dismantling the Mother Shelf: Expanding Our Thinking About Women’s Stories of Parenthood
Books centering mothers are often lumped into one category by the publishing industry, flattening the nuanced and varied experiences of this group into a one-size-fits-all niche. A memoirist asks the industry to do better.
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The United States of Writing
Writers share how they approach the writing life where they live, their personal points of view on the literary community (both small and large) and their place within it, and what resources are available to them as writers who don’t live in a metropolitan area.
Decolonize the Novel: Writing Against Western Strictures of Realism
The author of Border Less describes how audience responses to her debut novel’s play with form led her to wonder about the greater implications of the Western fixation on realism as the accepted novel style.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem about the pains and pleasures of cold weather, a short story that brings together an unexpected series of events, or an essay that contemplates companionship.
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What’s Left Out: The Poems That Haunt a Collection From the Outside
Every poetry collection has its “maybes” and “almosts,” the poems that didn’t make it to publication. A debut poet considers the poems that haunt a book from the outside.
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Way Out Here: One Writer’s Life in Maine
A novelist based in rural Maine shares how she creates community—by reading her literary ancestors, engaging with living writers all over the state, and hosting an online writers studio—all while dispensing with the archetype of the lonely writer.
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Family Farms and County Fairs: A Different Kind of Book Tour
Before the author of Barnflower was a writer, she was a farm kid. The memoirist shares moments from her book tour, which included meeting cows and visiting corn mazes alongside reading at local bookstores and reconnecting with friends.
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Getting Real About Time: How Data Modeling Can Help You Complete Your Next Big Project
After years spent on frustrating, time-consuming drafts, creating visual models helped one writer to assess the current state of a manuscript, estimate a completion date, and build confidence.
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The Waiting Seasons: One Poet’s Life in Alaska
From her home just outside of Fairbanks proper, a poet subverts mainstream Alaskan imagery to conjure the reality of her writing life, which includes a local waste transfer site, muddy shoulder seasons, and slow internet.
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In This Time of War: The Muses Refuse Silence
A poet explores the struggle to balance his roles as writer, educator, and activist during the war in Gaza and the refusal of silence during a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of civilians.
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Ghosted: How an Agent Helped Me Write About My Disability—Then Disappeared
Rejection of your work can be crushing, especially when the subject of your writing is personal. A writing teacher and book coach recounts her experience being guided and then stood up by an agent who expressed interest in her book.
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The Antithesis of Inspiration: Why ChatGPT Will Never Write a Literary Masterpiece
Even though ChatGPT can replicate and regurgitate the texts it has consumed, it still lacks the unique inspiration that lived experience provides for writers. A teacher of creative writing puts the AI chatbot to the test.
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Letting Go: How I Found an Agent After Giving Up
The author of Sing Something True recounts the path to writing the memoir she was afraid to write, grieving her identity as a writer after rejection, and finding solace (and representation) after shifting focus away from publication.
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