Genre: Creative Nonfiction
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.
Maine Artist Fellowship
Jackson Hole Writers Conference
The 2025 Jackson Hole Writers Conference was held from October 23 to October 25 at the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts in Jackson, Wyoming. The conference featured craft and publishing classes, lectures, panels, readings, and manuscript critiques for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. The faculty included poet Dāshaun Washington; fiction writers Laura Pritchett and Lucas Schaefer; and creative nonfiction writers Julie Barton, Bridget Crocker, and Greg Marshall.
Jackson Hole Writers Conference, P.O. Box 3871, Jackson, WY 83001. Matt Daly, Executive Director.
Andrea Long Chu: Authority
In this Center for Fiction event, author and critic Andrea Long Chu reads from her essay collection Authority (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) and talks about the inherent contradictions in the way people discuss and disagree about art, and traces the political and intellectual history of literary criticism in a conversation with Arielle Angel.
Lidia Yuknavitch: Reading the Waves
In this virtual event for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series, Lidia Yuknavitch reads from her memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books, 2025) and speaks to Porochista Khakpour about the process of rearranging fragments of writing.
Rehearsing
In the comedic documentary series The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder helps ordinary people rehearse difficult conversations they may be dreading by creating precisely replicated environments and hiring actors to prepare for each scenario. The elaborate sets include a fully functioning bar with patrons, a household with a child actor, and an exact reproduction of a Houston airport terminal. Compose a personal essay about a necessary conversation that has been weighing on you and write out several vignettes exploring potential ways the exchange might play out given your knowledge of your own mindset as well as the person you’re confronting. Consider incorporating thoughts about how some reactions or behaviors may be impossible to predict. How might this rehearsal of sorts help calm your nerves or provide an understanding of your own social tendencies?
All Talk
“The price of the ride was listening to people talk.” This sentiment is expressed by the young narrator of Joe Westmoreland’s 2001 coming-of-age autofictional book, Tramps Like Us, reissued this week by MCD, to describe his hitchhiking adventures in search of queer belonging and identity. The novel portrays a wide range of characters Joe comes across, befriends, works with, sleeps with, and sometimes loses on the road and in various cities. Compose a memoiristic piece that recounts a cast of characters you’ve met in the past, perhaps only briefly as you traveled from one place to another, who had colorful tales about lives very different from your own. Incorporate snippets of dialogue, trying as best as possible to recall any idiosyncrasies in their speech or vocabulary. Reflect on what you learned from listening and why these stories have stayed with you through the years.
Interview With Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
In this 2009 Granta interview, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o discusses his early life and his memoir Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (Pantheon, 2010) with Ellah Allfrey. Ngũgĩ died at the age of eighty-seven on May 28, 2025.
Flair for Drama
In the 1997 film Face/Off, an FBI agent survives an assassination attempt that kills his young son and is out for vengeance and justice. To foil this criminal’s next plot to bomb the city, the agent undergoes a secret surgery to replace his face with that of the criminal, only to have him surgically don the agent’s face, effectively creating a mirrored switch in physical identities and an epic showdown. Notable for its flabbergasting premise, another aspect of the film’s cult popularity is director John Woo’s signature style and trademark motifs: balletic action sequences, doves and churches, deadlocked gunfights, and coats blowing in slow motion in the wind. Write an essay about a dramatic situation from your past in which you insert small details and observations of physical description that complement the tone of your piece. How might you translate a slow-motion effect in cinema to a slow-motion moment in your storytelling?



