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In this event hosted by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Jane Wong reads “To Love a Mosquito,” a chapter from her memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023), and pieces of her mother’s diary, followed by a discussion about her approaches to poetry versus creative nonfiction.
In her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May, Yiyun Li writes about the loss of her two teenage sons. After her son Vincent’s death, Li wrote a book for him “in which a mother and a dead child continue their conversation across the border of life and death.” However, she finds that her son James’s character and their relationship evade her desire to write a book for him and in composing this memoir, Li embarks on a project to find a new alphabet, a new language, and a new way of storytelling. Taking inspiration from Li, write a lyrical essay about someone you have lost in a style that reflects their personality and your relationship, in all its complexities. Allow yourself to be experimental with structure and chronology.
In this interview for The Thread documentary series, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about his childhood experiences as a refugee and overcoming trauma, his parents’ complicated reaction to his writing career, and how storytelling and writing changed his life from an early age. Read about Nguyen’s essay collection To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other (Belknap Press, 2025) in our Best Books series.
In this interactive Narrative 4 writing workshop, Deborah Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender (Harper, 2024), leads participants through practical exercises on self-discovery, shares exemplary work, and discusses how a memoir can answer the question: “Who am I?” Taffa says: “We’re telling people what we’ve learned in the time that has transpired between when we were that character on the page and who we are now.”
In this episode of the Ehkili podcast, Sahar Mustafah talks to author and editor Susan Muaddi Darraj to discuss her anthology, Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing From the Diaspora (Palestine Writes Press, 2024), and the significance of amplifying Palestinian literary voices.
In this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Roxane Gay talks about how the word feminism has been defined through the centuries, the work included in her new anthology, The Portable Feminist Reader (Penguin Classics, 2025), and writing a romance novel with Channing Tatum.
Among the thousands of structures that were destroyed in the devastating Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year was one home in Altadena. The house had been slated for renovations to become a foundation and residency honoring the late author and critic Gary Indiana, who died in October 2024. A shipment of hundreds of books constituting the writer’s personal library arrived at the home hours before the Eaton Fire, the entirety of which is now lost. Along with the library was an irreplaceable record of the authors who inspired Indiana’s work. In an act of reparative imagination, write a personal essay about a literary hero of yours and reflect on what might drive their creativity. If there are interviews and other materials available in which your subject reveals their muses, allow yourself the freedom to focus on your own speculations and connections.
In this New Orleans Book Festival event hosted at Tulane University, authors Sarah M. Broom and Tracy K. Smith speak about the origins of their writing practices, the cultural impact of their respective literary works, and the power of storytelling to reach the truth in a conversation with Vann R. Newkirk II, senior editor at the Atlantic.
In this episode of NPR’s Wild Card podcast hosted by Rachel Martin, author Zadie Smith reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her debut novel, White Teeth (Random House, 2000), and talks about her forthcoming book of essays and her generation’s struggle with the notion of time. “I’ve always felt there wasn’t enough time. I would like to accept time and also love it,” she says.
Directed Boris Lojkine, the award-winning French drama film Souleymane’s Story follows a young immigrant from Guinea who prepares for his interview to seek asylum refugee status in Paris. In the harrowing forty-eight hours prior to his interview, Souleymane careens through the streets as a bike courier for a food delivery app account he rents for a hefty fee from a fellow immigrant, tries to memorize falsified stories about political imprisonment another immigrant coaches him on for a fee, and rushes to find a bed each night in a homeless shelter. Write a personal essay that recounts a momentous event from your life and begins forty-eight hours before the climactic scene. Try playing with focused descriptions of your surroundings and the style of your prose to reflect the pacing and dramatic moments of your story.
