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I’ve always considered myself a no frills, linear, begin-at-the-beginning, chronological-until-the-end type of person. Experimental writing was only for the few, the proud, those who could consume or create it unsupervised, without being deemed unintelligible or pretentious. Experimental writing for me was a Zen thing: I had to ask about it, so therefore I’d never understand […]

My novel has received 70 rejections over the last 21 months. I have written dozens of short stories and have only published four. I have written over a dozen personal essays and have only published one. I have written a ton of bad poetry, but managed to get a single one to print. As a

I started working at Watson Wyatt in San Francisco after I’d been let go from my dotcom gig in 2000. I was the first person the dotcom execs called into the office when they learned their funding would be cut and they had to lay off half of their hundred or so people. This brought

I had fantasies about how hugely creative I would be while pregnant — my body’s creation of a new person would ignite unprecedented levels of inspired creativity for my brain. I never expected how appallingly far off that was. My brain had never before experienced such vacuous emptiness as it did during those early weeks

The year my dad died, I was taking writing classes at University of Chicago. I was twenty-two and I wanted to be a writer. But let me clarify. I didn’t want to write. Writing was fucking hard. Writing meant sitting alone in my apartment, something I already did more than I wanted to. But being

Writing on a keyboard has become a natural gesture of many modern humans. Not a gesture but a motion; not a motion but a manner of being; more like eating or making love, a mode with us; as an apprentice woodworker would, years ago, have carved a dove from a pine knot in the off

I wrote in a poem once that I am “ruled by ruled paper.” I buy ten-cent notebooks at back-to-school specials and proceed to make lists and notes in them throughout the year. Things like stop by the bank, make brownies, email Sean, scoop cat’s litter box, update google calendar, GRADE, work on chapbook, Casandra’s open

I wrote in a poem once that I am “ruled by ruled paper.” I buy ten-cent notebooks at back-to-school specials and proceed to make lists and notes in them throughout the year. Things like stop by the bank, make brownies, email Sean, scoop cat’s litter box, update google calendar, GRADE, work on chapbook, Casandra’s open

To say it now: I can hear the tangible skin of words — as one might with his tongue taste musicalities or catch with the olfactory glands the boulder-grey whiffs of uncertainty. In eleventh grade, one afternoon, in my high school library, contemplating how O’Hara was telling us that Lana Turner had fallen, I came

How do we as writers best learn successful habits? By emulating the successful? As I prepared for my first return to AWP in six years, I had to brace myself for the inevitable recognition of Survivorship Bias in my own thinking and the confounding nature of writing advice in general. Never mind the fact that