When I was 10 in 1969, without permission, I went and had my hot combed

When I was a kid growing up in a white (and cis and straight) suburb

My ex-husband suffered bipolar disorder. We lived among the facts of his illness. Trips to

My graduate reading was supposed to be fifteen minutes, which is a hard number to

Of all the gifts a poet can be given, epilepsy is the richest. I fell

A few years ago, I taught a class on recovering joy in the writing process.

Somewhere in the middle of my fifth draft, I realized I was full of shit.

I write in a variety of genres: fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and the interesting thing

Keep Pure. Rolling Hand. Big Wave. Breaking down the Fortress. Luck and Fortune. Sound Knowledge.

There’s one thing that can’t be taught in writing classes. It’s really too bad, too,

Every writer needs to read. A lot. All the successful ones say the same thing:

I learned how to write fiction by understanding the language of visual art. As an

I find inspiration in very unexpected places. I am a fan of reading biographies/ essays/

Franz Kafka famously said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within

1. When your mother calls you on a Monday night Asking you how to spell

I’ve always considered myself a no frills, linear, begin-at-the-beginning, chronological-until-the-end type of person. Experimental writing

My novel has received 70 rejections over the last 21 months. I have written dozens

I started working at Watson Wyatt in San Francisco after I’d been let go from

I had fantasies about how hugely creative I would be while pregnant — my body’s

The year my dad died, I was taking writing classes at University of Chicago. I

Writing on a keyboard has become a natural gesture of many modern humans. Not a