Elizabeth Bishop famously exchanged letters with Robert Lowell so remarkable they were later collected and published (Words in Air). This Recording has prepared a selection of her letters to Lowell and others, including one edit focused on the year after a lover’s suicide. Pair with a meditation on the relevance of Bishop’s poetry at crucial life moments.
Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, edited
The Trouble With Memoirs
“If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.” Neil Genzlinger at the New York Times lays some ground rules for those compelled to write memoirs.
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A Community of Introverts
“What I want to know is, since when does making art require participation in any community, beyond the intense participation that the art itself is undertaking? Since when am I not contributing to the community if all I want to do is make the art itself?” Meghan Tifft gives voice to the struggle of the introverted writer in an essay for The Atlantic.
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True Romance
We might mock romance readers for how much Kleenex they go through, but they’re more emotionally perceptive than others. A new study on the interpersonal sensitivity of readers found that romance readers are better at discerning facial cues and emotion than other literati. But don’t worry if you aren’t a Nicholas Sparks fan; reading any genre makes you more empathetic, as we’ve reported on before.
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Not to Be Missed
At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell reports back from The Boring Conference, a riveting event that takes place each year in a nondescript hall in East London.
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That is a really lovely piece regarding Bishop, bless her heart.
Thanks for telling us about it.