For me, the big-daddy, litmus-test, most-uncomfortable-question-of-all has always been: do I need to be a writer, or merely want to? The implication being that one’s legitimacy as a writer depends on a yes to first part of the question, a…
If you’re in the Boston area, please join us at Craft on Draft tonight, April 7th, at Trident Booksellers and Café, where authors Celeste Ng, Christopher Castellani, and Daphne Kalotay discuss their point of view choices. Below, Celeste gives us…
By guest contributor, Lisa Borders. A professor of creative writing at Emerson College in Boston, Jessica Treadway’s latest novel, Lacy Eye, was published earlier this month. The novel will also be published in the UK and Australia, and translation rights have been bought…
Life happens. And sometimes life happens in the big middle of your best writerly intentions. A work project explodes and takes all your spare time with it. A family crisis turns you inside out emotionally. Your kid finally makes that traveling hockey…
As I got older, I thought life would get simpler. I’d go to work. I’d come home. I’d read away the hours. In my thirties, I discovered writing (well, rediscovered it after a particularly unhelpful, James Joyce-loving professor told me…
How Not to Write I used to keep a book on my shelf to remind myself how not to write. The book, call it Stricken, consisted of a collection of essays on the author’s recent widowhood. She had written it perhaps…