The Editors are spiking most of my copy now, unread. One has described it as “hopeless crap.” My master’s degree means nothing to this pack of half-wits at the Blade. My job is hanging by a thread. But Frankie, an assistant city editor, is not such a bad boss and it was she who, out of the blue, gave me this choice assignment. I was startled. A last chance to make good?
When the interstates reopened I took a trip to Baton Rouge to see my people, have a look around. I wanted to see the street I grew up on first.
I always experience a mild depression whenever I type up what I have written. This act seems redundant. The work has already been done.
A writer's obsession with John Keats and the Beatles.
Seven writers on their literary mentors.
Essays by Tayari Jones, Kevin Brockmeier, Crystal Wilkinson, Tift Merritt, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Bronwen Dickey, and Jamey Hatley.
Three stories by David Means from our Summer 2015 issue.
You’re aware—at least I am—that eternity will devour everything in its own time, and that whatever mark is left will be gone, because that awareness is essential to the work: a sense of catching some slice of time itself, making it stand at attention, and still.
A Writing on Writing essay from the 100th issue.
Pearl taught me to be a loving teller of the truth. This is the basis for my work as a writer and as a human being. If you are a person who loves the world, then you love your community, you love your family, and you love yourself. If you love them as they are, then you can write them as they are. Your humanity and theirs will rise to the top.
A Writing on Writing Essay from the 100th issue.
I spent considerably more time in the company of Donald Harington’s novels than I did in the company of Donald Harington. I’ve been doing the math. Between our introduction in 2003 and his death in 2009, we can’t have passed more than half a dozen hours together—
A Writing on Writing essay from the 100th issue.
I found myself in Jones’s writing. Kentucky. Black. Rural. Woman. I was especially taken with how she drew characters from the oral storytelling tradition and then broadened that form into her own literary style. I saw Jones’s act of making black speech the core of her work as revolutionary.
