What’s Left Out: The Poems That Haunt a Collection From the Outside
Every poetry collection has its “maybes” and “almosts,” the poems that didn’t make it to publication. A debut poet considers the poems that haunt a book from the outside.
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Article Archive: The Literary Life
Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
Decolonize the Novel: Writing Against Western Strictures of Realism
The author of Border Less describes how audience responses to her debut novel’s play with form led her to wonder about the greater implications of the Western fixation on realism as the accepted novel style.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem about the pains and pleasures of cold weather, a short story that brings together an unexpected series of events, or an essay that contemplates companionship.
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Way Out Here: One Writer’s Life in Maine
A novelist based in rural Maine shares how she creates community—by reading her literary ancestors, engaging with living writers all over the state, and hosting an online writers studio—all while dispensing with the archetype of the lonely writer.
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Getting Real About Time: How Data Modeling Can Help You Complete Your Next Big Project
After years spent on frustrating, time-consuming drafts, creating visual models helped one writer to assess the current state of a manuscript, estimate a completion date, and build confidence.
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Family Farms and County Fairs: A Different Kind of Book Tour
Before the author of Barnflower was a writer, she was a farm kid. The memoirist shares moments from her book tour, which included meeting cows and visiting corn mazes alongside reading at local bookstores and reconnecting with friends.
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The Waiting Seasons: One Poet’s Life in Alaska
From her home just outside of Fairbanks proper, a poet subverts mainstream Alaskan imagery to conjure the reality of her writing life, which includes a local waste transfer site, muddy shoulder seasons, and slow internet.
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The United States of Writing
Writers share how they approach the writing life where they live, their personal points of view on the literary community (both small and large) and their place within it, and what resources are available to them as writers who don’t live in a metropolitan area.
In This Time of War: The Muses Refuse Silence
A poet explores the struggle to balance his roles as writer, educator, and activist during the war in Gaza and the refusal of silence during a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of civilians.
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Ghosted: How an Agent Helped Me Write About My Disability—Then Disappeared
Rejection of your work can be crushing, especially when the subject of your writing is personal. A writing teacher and book coach recounts her experience being guided and then stood up by an agent who expressed interest in her book.
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The Antithesis of Inspiration: Why ChatGPT Will Never Write a Literary Masterpiece
Even though ChatGPT can replicate and regurgitate the texts it has consumed, it still lacks the unique inspiration that lived experience provides for writers. A teacher of creative writing puts the AI chatbot to the test.
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Letting Go: How I Found an Agent After Giving Up
The author of Sing Something True recounts the path to writing the memoir she was afraid to write, grieving her identity as a writer after rejection, and finding solace (and representation) after shifting focus away from publication.
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A Fertile Contamination: Considering Translations Among the Year’s Best Short Stories
The editor of The Best Short Stories 2022: The O. Henry Prize Winners sees translation as a way of putting a language back in movement by allowing the currents of different languages to mix and blend.
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1000 Words of Summer: How an Accountability Project Opened Up My Writing Life
For two weeks in June, more than 15,000 writers from around the world commit to writing a thousand words a day as part of the annual 1000 Words of Summer project.
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Confessions of a Failed Novelist: If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try, Try, Try, and Try Again
The best-selling nonfiction author describes the craft lessons he drew from the false starts that paved the way for his debut novel, All the Secrets of the World.
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Becoming a Mother-Writer: Notes on Reconciling the Personal, the Professional, and the Political
Advice on becoming a writer ignores the impact of motherhood—and fails to acknowledge the privileges of canonical writers. The author describes learning “to see art-making as a professional possibility” as a brown mother-writer.
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Lucia Berlin: My Mentor in Being an Outsider
The author reflects on finding a mentor in fellow literary outsider Lucia Berlin, long before Berlin’s fame.
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Endless Work: The Responsibilities and Pleasures of Translation
The author examines her personal relationship to the professional work of translation, forms of responsibility unique to the genre, and the complex notion of translation as a labor of love.
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The Thousand Pages: Tips for Transitioning to the Novel
The author of The Step Back offers strategies for short-story writers trying to draft a novel for the first time and shares how a new approach—aiming to pen a thousand pages—led to his first novel.
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New Ways of Surviving: Writing Through a Global Pandemic
The poet and essayist reflects on writing during the pandemic and its impact on her creative life and relationship with the writing community.
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Reading in the Bardo: Seeking Comfort in the Absence of Ritual
The author finds solace in rereading George Saunders’s novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, while mourning the death of her father during the pandemic.
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Telling #Stories: Can Social Media Make Us Better Writers?
The effects of social media on the creative process—although it can help writers identify and pay attention to the quotidian moments of their lives, does it siphon off their storytelling energy?
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Young and Adorable: Rewriting the Narrative of Women Writers’ Success
The author of the novel Goodnight Stranger reflects on her writing career and the cultural myths about success, youth, and appearance that women writers must navigate.
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How to Live: Lessons From Last Night’s Reading
The author reflects on what he’s learned about writing and life from attending readings for the past twenty-five years.
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The Insanity and the Inspiration: National Novel Writing Month
Follow three Philadelphia writers as they join a community of more than three hundred thousand writers participating in NaNoWriMo, a challenge to write a fifty-thousand-word novel during the month of November.