The Writer Laid Bare

For the past few years I’ve been writing a work of creative nonfiction that brings together memoir and research. It tells the story of a period of time in which I was blindsided by overwhelming postnatal anxiety and felt uncertain …

It’s been three years since I’ve worked on a book-long manuscript of my own. Lately my itch to write a new book has intensified. By nature I am not a short form writer, even though I’ve published many short fiction …

If you’re thinking about blogging, let me say this up front: DO IT. I’ve been writing online since 2003, but mid-way through 2006 a friend sent me a link to this website she called a ‘blog’. It was Dooce.com, where …

My favorite writers are not so much writers as seducers, shamans, tricksters. Their works affect me on a gut level. Reading their books feels like being hypnotised or making love. I cannot explain my excitement about Marguerite Duras, for example, …

I wrote my first novel Dancing with the Hurricane from the perspective of a fifty-one year old man sitting at his comatose uncle’s hospital bed. The nursing staff had advised him to squeeze his uncle’s hand and talk to him …

I didn’t do a lot of research for my first novel, just_a_girl. Speaking from the point of view of a teenager, full of contradictions: I could do that. Speaking from the point of view of a mother, fretting about …