I was conscious of where it might fit appropriately and naturally. I’ve played enough basketball to know that you can’t force a shot.
Molly McCloy’s new memoir, Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth, won the 2023 Book Pipeline “Unpublished” Award and the 2023 Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press. Red Hen will publish her book this month. The story recounts a letter Molly composed to her father, outlining nine times he failed […]
We know intellectually that we’re animals and that we’re mammals and that we function the same as other animals, but we don’t feel like it. And most of the time, we don’t have to really deal with the physicality of living on that intensive level.
I sometimes think artists are born with a built-in extra soul, one that has a natural tendency for the blues. Is it an inborn anointing? Or is it over-confidence, the sheer audacity to flatter myself?
You never hear painters or musicians complain about how painful it is for them to work, but writers frequently moan about it. That lack of pleasure in the work is often palpable when you read it.
This thing is well-documented in Pynchon — technology and capital are one entity
As I was writing, I was wrestling with the way American nationalism (which I think patriotism is usually a euphemism for) devours movements and history.
I think the right to privacy is something that we have very blindly jettisoned in recent years. We are not at all aware of the damage it is doing to us, to have our privacy so invaded and marketed and sold.
I met Keila Vall de la Ville in New York in 2024, when I was on tour with my book. We are both Venezuelan, immigrant writers that have made the U.S. their home for a long time. But the reality is that I felt like I already knew her. It’s unfair, and wrong, to presume […]
We are all formed to some extent by the language, religion and customs in which we grew up, yes. But I am less interested in the ways culture makes people different from one another than I am in the ways we are all the same. It’s only by looking past cultural differences to what we humans have in common that I can get to the level of empathy and understanding I need to turn a character into a real human being.