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"If you think the human mind is a wonderful thing, there is an infinite interest in cultivating it." Marilynne Robinson speaks with Bill Moyers about her novel Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), and her thoughts on faith, democracy, and creativity. Robinson discusses her new book of essays, The Givenness of Things (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"The mind is a much more generous resource than we're in the habit of considering it to be." The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist speaks about accessing imagination through writing and her teaching experiences at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Robinson discusses her new book of essays, The Givenness of Things (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The term “urban legend” refers to contemporary myths often connected to popular culture that are recounted to entertain and/or explain random events. Write an essay using an urban legend as a jumping-off point for probing into what you find entertaining or unsettling. For inspiration, you might consider the stories of Bloody Mary, exploding Pop Rocks, bodily spider infestations, or alligators in the sewer.
"It's hard to protect a person you love from pain, because people often choose pain. I am a person who often chooses pain. An animal will never choose pain." Mary Gaitskill, whose new novel, The Mare (Pantheon Books, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from her personal essay "Lost Cat" (Granta, 2009) at Baruch College.
"Write Around Portland just ignited that fire in me: to write, to get back to writing, and to really find my voice." Reuben Alvarez-Paris speaks about his experiences with the nonprofit organization dedicated to community and writing. Jenny Chu, program coordinator at Write Around Portland, will lead a panel at Poets & Writers Live on October 17 in Portland, Oregon.
"As readers we can't simply witness or observe a book from afar—we have to live inside it, we have to go through it, and every time we do, we expand a version of our own lives." Carrie Brownstein talks about the relationship between readers, books, and writers in her introduction to the 2013 National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 ceremony. Brownstein's debut memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (Riverhead Books, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"At the ocean's edge, which feels like a kind of conclusion to the clumsy whisper of names we read onto the land—we are left with no words for the choppy shove of the waves..." Jeffrey Thomson's debut memoir, Fragile (Red Mountain Press, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"Sometimes it's important for us to journal, or to create, or give voice to the things that we're even afraid to think about." Sandra Cisneros, author of the new memoir, A House of My Own: Stories From My Life (Knopf, 2015), talks about the transformative power of creative expression.
Whether or not you believe in astrology, it can be an engaging exercise to contemplate the authority of a prediction based solely on your birthdate. Look up your current horoscope in a newspaper or online, and take note of how the forecast characterizes your astrological sign. Which particular elements of the horoscope’s characterizations do you find yourself immediately agreeing with? If you find yourself mostly in disagreement, what would you predict for yourself instead? Using the second-person voice, write an essay in the form of an astrological forecast. Describe how you foresee the upcoming month in terms of love, finances, home, and spiritual matters, and cite how these predictions are justified by your personality traits. Or, if you’d prefer, write an essay against astrology, pointing out the flaws in such pseudoscientific systems of divination, and examining what it is about your personality that opposes them.
Belarusian author and investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich has received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was announced today in Stockholm by Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, who called Alexievich’s writing “a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
Alexievich is the author of seven books, including Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), for which she interviewed more than five hundred eyewitnesses of the 1986 nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine—including firefighters, doctors, physicists, politicians, and citizens—over a period of ten years. The book was awarded the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.
Her other works—such as 1988’s War’s Unwomanly Face, comprised of interviews with hundreds of women soldiers who fought in World War II—collect the memories of wartime, including the Soviet-Afghan war, the war in Afghanistan, and the fall of the Soviet Union, creating what Danius calls “a history of emotions—a history of the soul, if you wish.”
“By means of her extraordinary method—a carefully composed collage of human voices—Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era,” the academy noted. “For the past thirty or forty years, she has been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual. But it’s not really about a history of events…. What she’s offering us is really an emotional world.”
Alexievich was born in Stanislav, Ukraine, in 1948, and grew up in Belarus. She worked as a reporter for several local newspapers, a Belarusian carp fishing magazine, and a Minsk-based literary magazine before dedicating her work to oral histories. Persecuted by Lukashenko regime for the nature of her writing, Alexievich left Belarus in 2000 and lived under sanctuary for a decade in Paris, Gothenburg, and Berlin, before returning to Minsk in 2011.
She becomes the fourteenth woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature since it was first awarded in 1901. The last woman to win, Canada’s Alice Munro, received the award in 2013. French novelist Patrick Modiano won the 2014 prize. Alexievich will receive eight million Swedish kronor, or approximately $1.1 million.
