I’m at a dinner party. My partner gestures to me and says to the man we’re making small talk with: “Rose is a writer. In fact, she’s writing a novel!” “Well, isn’t that something!” he begins. I take a sip…
My farm is a novel that writes itself over and over, year after year, always with a similar story arc: I plant, I tend, things go wrong, bugs invade. I fend off crows and raccoons. I pray for rain. I…
I never went to summer camp. I always wondered what it was like, that thing that other kids in other places got to do. My mom couldn’t afford it. Instead, my brother and I spent our summers trying to stay…
Today, I awake at the ungodly hour of 5a.m. A cool breeze whisks away last night’s rain front, and I decide to take a short walk before I start writing. This place is a writer’s fantasy, just me, the page,…
As a writer, I sometimes worry so much about pleasing the marketplace that I become afraid to try new things and lose faith in that little voice that is my muse. This past weekend at Grub Street’s Muse and the…
The first page of Jenny Erpenbeck’s amazing 2014 novel The End of Days (Aller Tage Abend in German, available in English from New Directions) has to rank among the most agonizingly beautiful—and thematically apt—novel openings ever written: “The Lord gave,…