How long do we live in the fictions of our past? And how do we convince anyone that who we write is not necessarily who we are?.

One of my friends who writes novels says that once the book is published, it's a separate thing from you; it becomes its own. I feel that way when I ….

Nick Flynn is another writer I admire - his fragmented sections, his playfulness with genre, his urgency. The palette in his work is his style, a voi….

We read the world - television, movies, songs, books - and the people in it through the lens of our own lives..

Simply put, meta-writing is writing that is self-conscious, self-reflective, and aware of itself as an artifice. The writer is aware she's writing, a….

When I admire a writer, it's for the recognizable palette - Hemingway's minimalism, the dialogue, those isolated bar scenes. But with each story or n….

It's been very jarring for me to stand in public and read about myself and my daughter and her father. I feel like I'm reading someone else's story, ….

There's a moment in Sarah Manguso's The Guardians when she writes, "I try not to make anything up, and I fail every time." I get giddy when I come ac….

I like to think about the genre, the essay or the memoir, as much as I enjoy writing within its fluid parameters. And teaching allows me to think abo….