For NPR, Joyce Carol Oates talks about her childhood home and how it’s influenced her as a person and a writer. Pair with Brittani Sonnenberg’s Millions essay on finding a home as a writer.
Memories of Home
Seeing Beyond the Story
“When she began the cancer memoir, it was the fact of the writing, more than what was to be written, that mattered.” On Jenny Diski’s way of seeing beyond the story.
●
●
Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists
Once a decade, Granta publishes a special “Best of Young American Novelists” issue featuring work from American fiction writers under the age of forty. The latest list includes Millions staffer and City on Fire author Garth Risk Hallberg, as well as Lauren Groff, Yaa Gyasi, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Claire Vaye Watkins, to name just a few. The issue will hit shelves on May 4th.
●
●
Confessing / Confiding
“I wanted to offer my students an alternative to the purely confessional mode. I wanted them to write about themselves without falling into a paralyzingly portentous tone. I wanted more humor in their work, more complexity, more detail, more balance—more good writing. I wanted fewer italicized passages, less use of the breathless present tense. I wanted no more tears in the workshop, no more embarrassing scenes.” Emily Fox Gordon writes about trauma narratives in the classroom, the trouble with writing as therapy, and the key differences between confessing and confiding in an essay for The American Scholar.
●
●
Sloane Crosley’s Travel Advice
Sloane Crosley, this year’s editor of The Best American Travel Writing, out today, wrote some key travel tips for those who are vain, budget-conscious, and notoriously lazy.
●
●
Goodbye, Byes
Recommended Reading: Jason Arthur’s farewell to goodbye-to-New-York essays.
●
●
Tala Tubaris
Want to be as brilliant as Jonathan Swift? Try reading Latin for ten hours a day. As this New Statesman review of Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World makes clear, the satirist went through a backbreaking classics regimen at Kilkenny College in Ireland. (There’s also the fact that he wrote constant letters to a sickly female confidante.)
●
●
Women in Comic Books
There’s been a lot of talk about women breaking into traditionally male fields and hobbies, but in a blog post at The Missouri Review Caitlin Rosberg laments the continued underrepresentation of female characters and creatives in comic books. She then explores the work she’s doing to improve the situation by publishing women writers and artists in works like the Ladies’ Night Anthology. As she says, “I’m motivated in no small part by being able to say to those ‘make your own’ strawmen, ‘I do. I’m an editor contributing to published comic books. Are you?'”