Craft and Creativity
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Newest Features
How to Be Real When You’re Making Stuff Up?
Authenticity in Fiction As a fiction writer and novelist, I spend an embarrassing amount of time contemplating the components of good writing. I’ve sat through countless writing workshops, classes, and seminars where the instructor tosses out some variation of the question: What is good writing? It’s a simple enough ask, but the answers are varied…
Nonfiction, Trauma, and Healing
What’s Down There: The Body Keeps the Score In my view, the best nonfiction book of the past 20 years is The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk. The book is one of those cases where everything comes together. It explains the cause of a huge proportion of human suffering—a cause which our culture…
On Living the Questions
Poets are incessantly curious people, driven by both big questions (what is the meaning of life?), small questions (what should I have for dinner?), and craft questions (where should I use a line break?) One way to approach the craft of poetry writing is to think of the poem as an answer to a question….