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I think most of us who have ever had customer-facing jobs can say: dear god, it’s exhausting. Human beings, while resourceful and tenacious, are made of meat and therefore susceptible to all manner of physical and mental abuse. There’s only so much we can handle. After long enough, having the same conversation with a customer…

In our Writing Lessons series, writers and writing students will discuss lessons learned, epiphanies about craft, and the challenges of studying writing. This week, we hear from Amy Mackin, a candidate in the Communications program at Curry College. —Andrew Ladd, Blog Editor In my late thirties, I decided I wanted to write for publication. (I had…

Last year, I was talking to a romance novelist who self-publishes her books. She had decided to go this route after submitting a manuscript directly to Harlequin and not hearing back from them for months. What forced her hand was that she had kids, she had been working part-time, and her husband had just been…

In my wildest fantasies, an editor from Seal Press stumbles upon that personal essay I wrote about the awkwardness of babymaking sex—or the blog post I wrote about landing a husband despite being a crazy cat lady, or that other piece I wrote about my shifting body image—and feels compelled to email me, begging me to write a book…

The Man Who Loved Dogs Leonardo Padura Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, January 2014 592 pages $35.00 Buy: book | ebook “I asked you to come today because I want to tell you that story, Ivan,” the man who loved dogs said to me. [… ] “It’s an incredible story; you’ll see that I am not…

It must have been April when I looked at my calendar and decided that my summer was going to be an absolute wash.  This month alone, there’s the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup Finals, the French Open, and the World Cup happening almost simultaneously. And as avid sports fan, I knew June was going to…

Hello again, Writers. So I was driving to New York City a few weeks ago for a conference at NYU, where I talked about the ways story and song benefit public discourse. To say I’d been obsessing over the political impact of storytelling would be an understatement. So maybe it’s no surprise that I got worked up over this radio…

I knew I had a problem when I started envying my dog’s cone collar. Now, my dog’s problem was a hot spot. Allergic, itchy, hot, and double-coated, my German Shepherd had chewed her hind leg raw over the course of a single evening. My problem was research. Engrossing, surprising, discomfiting and endless, my novel-in-progress was…