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Doug McLean Alice Munro's Writerly Wisdom: Short Stories Aren't Small Stories
The Nobel Prize winner is a role model for writers looking to bridge the personal, domestic details of the short story with the global forces of history, author Kyle Minor says.
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Doug McLean What Great Artists Need: Solitude
The lesson author Dorthe Nors took from Ingmar Bergman: It's not drugs, poverty, or wild lovers that make a great writer. It's discipline and time alone.
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'Life Keeps Changing': Why Stories, Not Science, Explain the World
Author and journalist Jennifer Percy was a committed physics major until a Lawrence Sargent Hall story showed her a more satisfying way to approach life's complexities.
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What It Really Means to Be 'Kafkaesque'
Author Ben Marcus says the beautiful but sorrowful strangeness of Kafka's "A Message from the Emperor" make it a perfect piece of writing.
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'It Has to Come to You': Why Jim Harrison Writes Patiently
The veteran author says Theodore Roethke's poetry is a reminder that sometimes you're hot, sometimes you're not.
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How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More
Highlights from 12 months of interviews with writers about their craft and the authors they love
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Amy Tan's Lonely, ‘Pixel-by-Pixel’ Writing Method
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” helps remind the Joy Luck Club author to capture the “microscopic” details that make her characters unique.
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How Aimee Bender Feels After Memorizing a Poem: 'Caffeinated'
Committing the words of Wallace Stevens to memory unlocked an emotional and physical magic within her, Bender says.
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'You Begin to Breathe Again': Samuel Beckett's Humor as a Coping Mechanism
Author Paul Auster says Beckett shows how important laughter is in writing.
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Doug McLean One Way to Keep Writing: 'Remember Death'
Russell Banks's biggest inspiration isn't another author—it's a gravestone inscription lurking near his desk.
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Doug McLean The 'Stubborn Gladness' of Elizabeth Gilbert's Favorite Poet
The Eat, Pray, Love author celebrates the late Jack Gilbert, whose works challenge readers to find joy within suffering.
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Doug McLean Should Literature Be Personal or Political?
Bob Shacochis confronts the tension between exploring the everyday "frivolity" of our private worlds and making broad statements about the one we share.
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'Stephen King Saved My Life'
Young-adult novelist Robin Wasserman says the famous horror writer empowered her as a teen reader by capturing the uneasy teenage phase between childhood and adulthood.
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Doug McLean The Poem That Made Sherman Alexie Want to 'Drop Everything and Be a Poet'
Alexie never thought he could leave his reservation to pursue a writing career—but a line written by Adrian C. Louis taught him to venture outside the "reservation of his mind."
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Doug McLean The Case for Writing a Story Before Knowing How It Ends
Andre Dubus III, author of Dirty Love and The House of Sand and Fog, explains why the best work happens when you "back the fuck off."
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Jonathan Franzen on the 19th-Century Writer Behind His Internet Skepticism
His new book translates works by Karl Kraus, whose misgivings toward progress mirror Franzen's belief that technology can be "very harmful" to artistic production.
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'How Dare It Make Me Feel So Much': The Spell of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Author Ron Carlson was an unassuming, baseball-playing college student until a Fitzgerald story turned him into an impassioned English-major library vandal.
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Doug McLean 'Think About Characters Like a Sphere': How John Cheever Wrote Inner Turmoil
Novelist Paul Harding explains what Cheever's short story "The Jewels of the Cabots" taught him about portraying humans' contradictory impulses.
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Doug McLean Two Tacos for A Moveable Feast: A Writer's Life-Changing Barter in Tijuana
In 1972, Daniel Woodrell traded part of his lunch for a copy of Ernest Hemingway's posthumous novel. After he read it, he became determined to be a writer.
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Doug McLean ‘All Immigrants Are Artists’
Edwidge Danticat, author of Claire of the Sea Light, believes that "re-creating your entire life is a form of reinvention on par with the greatest works of literature."
