A Vicarious Encounter with Gregory Pardlo

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If I’m trying to capture a nuanced emotion, I turn to poetry. When I suspect there is an insight to be gained that could potentially contribute to the discourse around a particular issue, I bring my essay game.
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The Golden Age of Nonfiction: Courtney Hodell on the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

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It’s a magnificent time to be alive as a reader of serious creative nonfiction. Genres are blurring to thrilling effect; forms are loosening up, offering writers greater latitude to find the right shape to house their ideas; readers are hungry for fresh experiments in voice and point of view. 
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The Next Great American Crime Writer May Be Living in Norway

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"It’s like walking a high wire without a net, but it’s a second career and it’s a chance to turn a corner. I feel I can really appreciate it at this point in my life because it’s the first job I’ve ever had where it’s just absolute blue sky."
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Getting to the Edge of Darkness: The Millions Interviews Douglas Light

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Writing for me is an exploration of a question and an expression of the emotion that the question evokes.
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Listening for the Story: The Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle

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The book is the two of us together. I can’t think of a page or a sentence that’s just one of us—that’s all Charlotte or that’s all Léna. It was really beautiful.
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The Novel Versus the Short Story: A Conversation with Matthew Lansburgh

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I would argue that given the increasingly diminished attention spans we all have these days, short stories should be more popular than ever.
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It’s Only a Game Until It Isn’t: The Millions Interviews Michael Nye

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I'm suspicious of nostalgia in narrative art. It always rings false to me.
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The Possibilities of Coexistence: The Millions Interviews Michael David Lukas

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Jews have been in the United States for 350 years. Jews were in Cairo for a thousand. Within that kind of time span, you have ups and downs, obviously. But that long history of Jews in the Arab world has been erased in a lot of ways, for political means, or political purposes, by all parties.
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Writing Isn’t a Career, It’s a Mission: An Interview with André Aciman

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The idea that you should work on a sentence for half a day would never occur to any young writer today.
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Joseph Cassara Wants His Characters to Break Your Heart

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Sometimes living life truthfully as a queer person of color in this predominantly white hetero-patriarchy feels like a radical political act in and of itself.
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Words Can Sustain and Save Us: The Millions Interviews Marie Howe

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If people don’t turn to art and they don’t turn to religion, we’re left with consumerism.
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Providing a Space for Madness: The Millions Interviews Yuri Herrera

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Megalomania can be seen very clearly in the old kingdoms, as well as in decaying democracies with spoiled frat-boys-turned-presidents who decorate their houses with animal skins and golden furniture.
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Reconciling America’s Original Sin: The Millions Interviews Deanne Stillman

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I think it’s kind of a universal situation—that sooner or later we often find ourselves accepted for being one thing, but in our hearts we’re something else.
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The Story Is Never the Whole Story: The Millions Interviews Daniel Mendelsohn

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When you write a memoir, you have an unwritten pact with the reader that you have to be expose even the unattractive aspect of your narrative. I mean really embarrassing things that make you squirm and might make the reader squirm.
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Writing Bound to Bodies: Cristina Rivera Garza in Conversation with Samantha Hunt

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I see myself as someone creating spaces in language in which rubble may speak for itself, bringing its pastness with it. In a country in which bodies are made to forcefully disappear, a skeleton is a last remnant of the material life—and a material truth—it held.
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Then Who Am I? The Millions Interviews Kathleen Hill

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It’s sometimes when we’re most at sea, even desperate, that novels speak to us most strongly, as if our lives depend on learning something from them essential to our own survival.
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At Once Distant and Very Close: The Millions Interviews Bill McKibben

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There’s a dwindling number of us who can remember life before the Internet, and there’s almost no one who can remember life before the saturation of television.
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We’re Not Going Anywhere: The Millions Interviews Attica Locke

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I do not believe white nationalists in Charlottesville get to define what America is. They are a very loud and very visible symptom of a big-ass problem, but they’re not the whole of what we are.
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