Matthew Fox’s Writing Spaces

The most important thing is getting the words on the page. The second most important thing is staring. Every writer needs unrestricted staring time, and that’s what I get at Macke Prinz. It’s a bar-café on Berlin’s Zionskirchplatz, a plot of lackadaisically manicured greenery dominated by a church. Roads pool around it, frustrating drivers. Bright […]

What’s Rea Tarvydas Reading?

Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke my Heart is a house book, and I love house books. By this, I mean books that are centered about houses, in which the house represents the whole world. Even when the main character moves away from the house, her life still revolves around it. Jen Sookfong Lee grew up in […]

Finding the Form with Joe Davies

When I write I’m often drawn to that spot where the mundane greets the absurd, and for the mundane aspect I sometimes draw quite heavily on personal experience. “Fifty Dollars” very much fits that pattern. The camping, the uncooperative weather, the feelings of melancholy that can crop up after a holiday, and most importantly, the […]

What is Scott Armstrong Reading?

Author: Bret Easton Ellis Novel: The Shards Published: 2023 Bret Easton Ellis is an author whose very name can bring on an almost immediate distaste, even though few can remember why. And, then, when we, followers of his works, remind them of several titles he has published to remarkable acclaim, and several movie adaptations, ‘American […]

Finding the Form with Kate Cayley

My story, “A Day,” is about a young girl going to visit her relatives on the East side of the wall in Berlin in 1989, just before the end. She narrates the story as an adult, now living in another country, looking back. It’s a spare story: we don’t get much of what she’s feeling. […]

What’s Bernadette Rule Reading?

Recently I have read several books that I can heartily recommend. The first is Foster (faber & faber, 2010) by Irish writer Claire Keegan. Her work is extremely spare, resulting in very short books which are all but short stories produced as novels. I cannot recommend all of her work, as some of it is […]

Alanna Marie Scott’s Writing Space

I write nomadically, and I write by hand. I carry at least one notebook and at least three pens with me and I write wherever I’m taken by the impulse: – Hunched like a gargoyle in bed – Lying on the couch – Around my food at the dining table – Sitting on the floor […]

Alanna Marie Scott in

Finding the Form with Kelsey Andrews

I know flowers can seem overdone and easy to write about, but to me they mean sex and death, and nothing much is easy about that. Sex when they’re bright with pollen and attracting insects, then death when they, you know, die. The first stanza of my poem “Peony” came from a moment in the […]

What’s Bobbie Jean Huff Reading?

I find it risky to read when I’m writing intensely. When I do read, I sometimes find that my writing sounds like Molly McClosky for a few pages, then Sally Rooney for another few before, maybe, Ian McEwan takes over until the end of the chapter. You get the picture. But often books just sneak […]

Bobbie Jean Huff in

What’s Andrew Westoll Reading?

I just finished reading The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker, that 1967 classic of nature writing that I had somehow overlooked until now. A friend who had taken a film course from Werner Herzog two decades ago had told me that the great German filmmaker had loved The Peregrine and had quoted from it by memory in class, and that was all […]