In the earliest years of parenting, the tensions between motherhood and artistic practice can feel insurmountable. Yet there are ways in which motherhood and the writing life are uniquely compatible.
Anyone who is a writer is also a researcher. Stories sprung from one’s imagination are not exempt from these duties. Fiction writers frequently write about a time and place they know—think Conrad and the Congo in The Heart of Darkness or Harper Lee and the rural South. Similarly, writers become interested in a time or…
Recently, an interview that Barack Obama gave in 1995—which was republished in The New Yorker just before the Presidential Inauguration in 2009—made the rounds on social media again.
Political campaigns, like novels, have a beginning, middle, and end. Hard as it may be to believe, we are still in Act Two of the story that will come to be the 2016 presidential election. Act One is comprised of everything that happens in an election prior to the first primary and caucus votes being…
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead became my favorite novel a decade ago. I read the first half the book in Iowa City and the second half the book in Wichita, Kansas, which undoubtedly brought the narrator’s prairie landscape to life. I lived the book in solitude, existing with Reverend John Ames on the steps of Iowa City’s…
Literary Enemies: Flannery O’Connor vs. Marilynne Robinson Disclaimer: Marilynne Robinson has no enemies. I hope you’ve never compared Marilynne Robinson to Flannery O’Connor, but I can see how you might have been tempted. There’s Iowa, first of all, and if it weren’t a proper noun I would have capitalized it anyway. Flannery O’Connor studied at…
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