Retreat! Retreat! Retreat!
I am not a writer who yearns for a cabin in the woods for weeks at a time. Being away from my life for long periods does not fill me with creative joy. I wish it did. Just like I…
I am not a writer who yearns for a cabin in the woods for weeks at a time. Being away from my life for long periods does not fill me with creative joy. I wish it did. Just like I…
When I last left you, I’d imparted some good advice: always have a back up title for your novel. So when your publisher wants to change it, you have more than a sense of desperation at your disposal. When I…
Author Rebecca Makkai lives outside Chicago with her husband and two daughters. Described by Richard Russo as “a writer to watch, as sneakily ambitious as she is unpretentious,” her first novel, The Borrower, was a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an…
I was sitting on a crowded beach the other day, when I overheard a 50-something guy say, “Did you know The Way Way Back was filmed in Onset?” The man on the towel next to him replied, “I liked that…
I got my first dog, Zoe, in 2012 at a time when I was trying to finish a draft of my novel in order to apply to the Incubator program. Zoe was a good dog and a very easy puppy….
All my favorite books come from a “deep place of junior high trauma.”* From Harriet the Spy to The Outsiders, right on up through Rick Moody’s Purple America and Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. Picture Olive at eleven. She has huge feet….