Camp Tin House
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…
Category: Women Writers
Beware of the Writer in Your Head
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,…
YA Wednesday: How to Up Your Word Count, Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a YA Author, Stay True to Yourself, Slaying Dragons, and Game of Thrones
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…
Looking the Sphinx in the Eyes
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,…
An Interview with Michelle Hoover, Author of Bottomland
Building on her critically acclaimed debut novel The Quickening, Michelle Hoover’s gripping, brilliantly crafted new release, Bottomland, follows the Hess family’s struggle to stay together on the Iowa plains following the mysterious disappearance of two family members during the years…
Making it Work: 4 Tips for Squeezing Writing between Job, Kids, Life
Some weeks before my artist friend Vicki Paret’s baby arrived, she stretched nine canvases of equal size. She gridded nine rectangles on each canvas. Eighty-one rectangles would form one epic painting. She worked methodically, left to right, top to bottom….