Centered around what happens to one family during the summer of 1948, Elizabeth Poliner’s first novel, As Close to Us as Breathing, is a story of loss—whether sudden or creeping—and of memories layered in time. Narrator Molly sifts through mid-life…
We write about the other with varying degrees of rigor and success. Homer’s default was narrow (white, male, hetero, warrior), but even that long ago he tasked himself with imagining his way into immortals. Chaucer wrote in the voice of…
Five years ago, I wrote a Tumblr post about how sometimes I hate my Work in Progress. Today, I turn in final edits to my editor for that same Work in Progress. After x amount of years (I’ve lost count)…
Recently, a cab driver was driving me home from the airport. After hearing I’d just come from Dallas, he gazed in the mirror back at me and loudly and, completely unsolicited, declared: “Everywhere you’ve been, darling, I’ve been. Everything you’ve…
NaNoWriMo has officially begun and not just for adults. Some teachers are even doing NaNoWriMo with their students. It’s pretty cool that trying to write a novel in a month has become a national tradition. I’m not starting a new…
How do we write a truly scary story? What unsettled us in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House? What tension building secrets did Stephen King employ when drafting the locker room shower scene in Carrie? It wasn’t…