Article Archive: The Literary Life

In a continuing series examining the state of literature abroad, poets Amjad Etry and Hala Mohammad and filmmaker Muhammad Bayazid discuss the challenges that writers and artists face amidst ongoing political turmoil in Syria.

In the second installment of Where We Write, a fiction writer takes a trip back home to Hannibal, Missouri, the boyhood home of Mark Twain and the town that still inspires her work, long after she's moved away.

Novelist Daphne Kalotay argues the merits of silence, even when it follows the publication of an author’s book.

Benjamin Percy cautions beginning writers to avoid overusing backstory in their fiction, offering strategies for moving the story forward by slipping a character’s history into the dramatic present.

After reading about one famed writer’s seemingly carefree existence, novelist Jesse Browner ruminates on his personal decision to forego the romanticized bohemian life and contemplates every writer’s choice to pursue the trade-offs writers face between artistic aspirations or financial security.

While caring for her dying grandmother, author Lisa Saffran gained new perspective on the richness of life in language as well as a renewed perseverance as a creative writer.

Joshua Bodwell explores the fiction behind this “writer’s writer” whose characters are as deep and complex as the man who created them.

Why do some writers prefer company and background noise, while others need isolation? Why do some need the magical monotony of sameness, and others the inspiration of variety? What does it mean for a writer to be locked into a place? What does place even mean to a writer?

Let me be the last—the absolute dead last—to point out that we're in the midst of a memoir craze. My favorite form of procrastination used to be computer solitaire, but now I prefer to chat on the phone with my writing friends and discuss the ongoing boom in autobiographical literature. We speculate like housing developers prognosticating on the real estate market. Will the bubble pop? Will prices continue to rise? Will market trends ever again veer toward literary fiction?

From Thoreau to Arthur Miller for centuries writers have been escaping to personal cabins—some even hand built by the writers themselves—for the solitude necessary to slip inward.