I hope you enjoy this interview!

About Kristine Langley Mahler

Kristine Langley Mahler is a memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska, a city ridging the backbone of the West and the Midwest. Her debut essay collection, Curing Season: Artifacts is out now. A second collection of essays, A Calendar is a Snakeskin, is forthcoming with Autofocus in spring 2023.

Kristine is the recipient of a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council and her work has been named Notable in Best American Essays (2019 and 2021), received the Rafael Torch Award from Crab Orchard Review, won the Sundog Lit Collaboration Contest, and is published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Speculative Nonfiction, among others. She is the director and publisher of Split/Lip Press.

You can find her on her website or follow her on Twitter.

About Curing Season

After spending four years of adolescence in suburban North Carolina, Kristine Langley Mahler, even as an adult, is still buffeted by the cultural differences between her pioneer-like upbringing in Oregon and the settled southern traditions into which she could never assimilate. Collecting evidence of displacement—a graveyard in a mall parking lot, a suburban neighborhood of white kids bused to desegregate public schools in the 1990s, and the death of her best friend—Curing Season is an attempt to understand her failed grasp at belonging.

Mahler’s yearning for acceptance remains buried like a splinter, which she carefully tweezes out in the form of artifacts from her youth. But it isn’t until she encounters a book of local family histories that she takes inhabitation and truth apart, grafting and twisting and imprinting her history on theirs, until even she can no longer tell the difference between their truth and her own. Using inventive essay forms, Mahler pries apart the cracks of exclusion and experiments with the nature of belonging, memory, and place. Curing Season is a coming-of-age memoir for anyone who grew up anywhere but home.

Interview with Kristine Langley Mahler

Lori Walker: First off, I’d love to hear a bit about how you became a writer. What has your journey as an author been like? What drew you to essays?

Kristine Langley Mahler: I’ve been a diehard essayist—though I’ve really leaned into using the term “memoirist” instead since it feels more accurate—since I was a senior in high school and my writing teacher gently pointed out that the thing I was writing was actually creative nonfiction—I literally didn’t know that there was a term for “short stories that actually happened.” This was the early internet era (1999)! I’ve been writing nonfiction ever since. 

I can’t make up worlds or stories to save my life, but I am so committed to and fascinated by looking at the ways we tell ourselves stories about our lives and trying to distinguish between truth and shaped-truth.

LW: What does a typical day of writing look like to you?

KLM: This is like the exact opposite of the writing advice most people give, but after years of experience, this is what it looks like for ME: I spend a lot, a lot, a lot of time NOT writing. A lot of time walking (without my phone), trying to pay attention to where I am, letting my mind wander. I spend a lot of time sitting on my couch and staring, letting the eyes go fuzzy, going into the subconscious brain. 

As a memoirist, I honor the knowledge that I am collecting experiences every day and that they are often not ready to be processed right away. In the same vein, I try to stay open to those memories/experiences which are making their way to the surface. When they do, that’s when I write. Sometimes it’s a phrase or a memory I want to write down, sometimes it’s an idea for an essay form. 

When I’m ready, I’m READY! And then it’s go-time—whenever I can grab a chunk of time in front of the laptop, and when I can’t, I’m voice-texting in my iPhone’s notes.

LW: You have a number of publication credits to your name, both essays and articles. What is your advice for writers wanting to make a career out of freelance writing?

KLM: I have a good number of publication credits, but I don’t have a very good freelancing career! Most of my publications have been in university-sponsored literary journals, which often don’t pay (or pay in author copies of the journal). I think I could count on ten fingers the number of times I’ve received an actual honorarium for my work. 

So take this advice with a grain of salt, but I would argue that as a writer, you need to consider your specific voice. If you are driven to write more experimentally in your non-paid work, using your time to write articles for a mass audience can deplete your creative energy. I say this as someone who has spent the past few months only writing articles or responding to interviews to help support Curing Season—I miss my creative energy! One really does come at the cost of another.

LW: Do you have a process for generating ideas to write about? What does that look like?

KLM: I’ve been writing toward my next book, which is a collection of essays about ancestry and the privilege of home, and so recently I’ve been looking at all of my homes and thinking about what I want to say about them. 

I’m kind of terrible at generating writing topics—my work drafts are the most surprising and interesting when I don’t know where they’re going—so rather than coming up with specific ideas of “what to write about” explicitly, I like to use prompts someone else has created because there are always memories or moments floating around in my head but they only come out to respond to a prompt.

LW: I’m always curious about the process of putting together a collection. Did you write a bunch of essays, then realize that there was a theme, or did you choose the theme of not belonging and write essays to fit it?

KLM: I’d originally thought Curing Season was a different book! I had written an essay collection all about home and belonging, but it wasn’t working so I spent the summer of 2020 taking the old book apart and bringing together a large subcurrent within the old book: all the essays about my adolescence in Pitt County, North Carolina. Once I saw them together, it was obvious that they were a complete narrative on their own.

LW: The Curing Season is an experimental collection. You have essays that take on the physical appearance of a shadowbox and a list, to name a couple. What can you tell us about your process for these experimental forms? How did you know the experiment would be successful? How did you come up with the form for the content of the essay?

KLM: Honestly, I was surprised by how many formal structures I ended up using in these essays. The essays were not written with each other in mind, and it startled me to realize that most of the work I’d written about Pitt County and my adolescence seemed to have almost REQUIRED me to use alternate forms to approach that subject matter. 

It’s clear to me now that I had to experiment with an essay’s shape because of how much I had both wanted to create structure out of that time and how much I felt constrained by the cultural structures I didn’t build. 

The specific forms are specific to the essays themselves—“Not Something That’s Gone” and “Mädchenfänger,” for instance, are both about a friendship that has a closure and the closed forms of the essays (looping phrases that enclose the narratives) echo that feeling.

LW: A lot of authors are creating playlists to accompany their books, but this being a reading column, I’d like to know what your “reading playlist” is. What books should people read after reading Curing Season?

KLM: Sleepovers by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips; Girlhood by Melissa Febos; Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood.

Lori Walker is the Operations Maven at DIY MFA. Though she’s fallen off the wagon as a writer, she’s hoping to return to writing essays (perhaps even a novel!) through her involvement with DIY MFA. She is also Launch Manager, Web Editor, and Podcast Producer for DIY MFA and a Book Coach. She resides in Smalltown, Oklahoma, with her husband and their cat, Joan Didion. You can follow her on Instagram at @LoriTheWriter.

The post The Book Nook: Interview with Kristine Langley Mahler appeared first on DIY MFA.

Charlie Jane is the author of the essay collection Never Say You Can’t Survive along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. 

Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. 

Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

In this episode Charlie Jane Anders and I discuss:

• What makes something an “idea” versus a “story” and how to tell the difference.
• How to keep short stories contained while making them rich and deep.
• Why she believes endings are hard and what she does to cross the finish line.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Charlie Jane Anders 

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy released in April 2021, along with the short story Even Greater Mistakes and the essay collection Never Say You Can’t Survive. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

Even Greater Mistakes

In her short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders upends genre cliches and revitalizes classic tropes with heartfelt and pants-wettingly funny social commentary.

The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.

A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse.

Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they’ll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant.

The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, “this generation’s Le Guin.”

Never Say You Can’t Survive

From Charlie Jane Anders, the award-winning author of novels such as All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night, this is one of the most practical guides to storytelling that you will ever read.

The world is on fire.

So tell your story.

Things are scary right now. We’re all being swept along by a tidal wave of history, and it’s easy to feel helpless. But we’re not helpless: we have minds, and imaginations, and the ability to visualize other worlds and valiant struggles. And writing can be an act of resistance that reminds us that other futures and other ways of living are possible.

Full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish during the present emergency, Never Say You Can’t Survive is the perfect manual for creativity in unprecedented times.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links for Even Greater Mistakes and Never Say You Can’t Survive, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 390

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 390: Idea to Premise to Story: Crafting a Dynamic Short Story – Interview with Charlie Jane Anders appeared first on DIY MFA.

Marcus is the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. 

Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity, and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change.

This led him to become a writer and to found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020.

On a more personal note, Marcus is a word nerd. He is part of our community, and when he reached out to share that he would be publishing his first collection of essays—Readying to Rise—I knew we had to have him on the show.

In this episode ​​Marcus Harrison Green and I discuss:

• How he achieved a unity of voice as he put together his debut essay collection.
• The importance of looking honestly at ourselves and how that can make society better.
• Why he loves living the life of the writer and what it allows him to do in the world.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Marcus Harrison Green

Marcus Harrison Green is the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity,  and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020.

Readying to Rise

Social justice is an ideal. It’s not a reality. And while there are moments that make it feel tantalizingly close, the moment that follows often punts it right back to the far distance. Growing up black in south Seattle, journalist and essayist Marcus Harrison Green has a keen sense of exactly where and how things break down. From his own experience in the classroom and at the hands of police to his fierce dissection of the racism baked into media and journalism, Green makes poetry of the clarity that comes after long reflection.

In this collection, Green bears sharp witness to the Black Lives Matter movement, his own journey into and out of religious faith, his grandmother’s lessons, his battle with bipolar disorder, human mortality, blatant hypocrisy, and much more.

He shines a light on what hurts the most deeply in us: not only the brutal injustice of a world built by the powerful for the powerful but the close proximity of that brutality to a persistent kernel of hope.

Yet because there is hope, there is conviction. Green never falters in the knowledge that the struggle itself is something to tie ourselves to and define ourselves by. With astute analyses, evocative imagery, profound empathy, and the ability to laugh at it all, these essays, even with their collective weight, leave us much lighter than they found us.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 384

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 384: Writing Personal Essays with Honesty, Authenticity, and Hope – Interview with Marcus Harrison Green appeared first on DIY MFA.

But no, our published pieces are captive to the amber of time, words that were written can’t be unwritten. Your writing is out there naked in the world colliding with the viewpoints, critiques, and skepticism of others. 

Returning written words to your imagination isn’t an option, but embracing those words is, no matter how imperfect you might perceive them. An essay collection just might make for the perfect embrace.

More than just an exercise in self-aggrandizement, or a nonfiction writer’s greatest hits, an essay collection can trigger reflection, contemplation, and self and societal assessment in a reader. Essential ingredients for both individual and social betterment. 

No, not everyone’s essay collection will have the might of Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard, but, of course, not everyone is Toni Morrison. But your resurrected work can provide readers with a unique way of looking at their life, this world, and the people they inhabit it with. 

But choosing exactly what to include out of your massive archive of writing can provide a unique challenge. What stays and what goes? How do you organize it all? And will any of it still resonate with readers after all this time? 

These are questions I was forced to answer while gathering the essays that comprise my collection, Readying to Rise. Hopefully my hard earned knowledge can assist you with building your own essay collection. 

1. Embrace the Past

Reencountering old writing can be scary, in no small part because you’ve hopefully evolved as a person, writer, and thinker since you put the final punctuation mark on a months or years-old essay. 

A friend says old writing can be like bumping into an ex. You’re different and so are they, but no matter how the relationship ended, whether you wish it had concluded differently or not, you have to make peace that you made an impression upon their life, and they yours.  

You were who you were during that time period. And that is completely okay. Chances are, the thoughts, experiences, and interpretation of events then still ring true to someone encountering a similar circumstance that you previously wrote about. One person’s past is another’s present, afterall. 

Maybe you would’ve even drastically changed things had you written the same piece today. But remember writing is like Virgina Madsen’s description of wine in her monologue from the movie Sideways: I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

Don’t deprive readers of the taste of your past work, the work you were uniquely able to craft on a singular day, just because your own tastes have evolved. 

2. Make Order Out of Chaos

Most of your work was probably intended to live as stand alone pieces without regard to potentially being bound together one day in a single essay collection.

This means you have to go about the business of organizing disjointed columns or essays into something that a) makes it look like you knew what you were doing all along and b) doesn’t completely jar the reader’s sensibilities. Going from a scarthing piece on FEMA’s missteps following Hurricane Katrina to a musing on overcoming severe halitosis probably isn’t the best sequencing. 

Once you’ve identified all the pieces you found fit to reprint, you want to ensure that you’ve categorized them under comprehensible themes. They don’t necessarily have to be grouped by a concrete topic (e.g. politics, culture, art, etc.) but a reader should be able to implicitly understand why an essay was placed where it was.

I originally chose to group my essays under three categories: Tribulations, Trials, and Triumphs that corresponded with essays dealing with my mental health struggles. I eventually decided it would be better to sort them chronologically. 

You shouldn’t try to shoehorn a piece into a category. If you have enough pieces that seem out of place, there’s nothing wrong with simply creating a new category called Random!

3. Pick That Which Endures 

With an essay collection what’s old is new again. A piece you wrote five years ago about the destigmitizatizing mental health in professional sports may now have new relevance given the recent stances of athletes like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka. Likewise, a profile you wrote about an Afghanistan War veteran’s return home a decade ago might provide an illuminating insight into the recently concluded conflict. 

In both cases, it’s not only that each story has a renewed news peg, it’s that each story deals with underlying issues that will be ongoing long after your book is planted on someone’s self: The normalization of discussing mental health in the workplace, and America’s role in conflicts abroad. 

You want to do your best to ensure that what you’ve selected can add to those continuing conversations. 

4. Your Vulnerability is Someone Else’s Strength

My favorite writer, James Baldwin, once said that a primary reason he wrote was so that long after he’d departed, hopefully someone who was looking through the wreckage of the past for words of inspiration, comfort, and affirmation might find refuge in his work.

Black, gay, and atheist at a time when just one of those identities would invite scorn, prejudice, and even death, he left a goldmine of words for others to find who dealt with racism, homophobia, bigotry, and alienation. 

Writing about your life’s struggles is never easy, especially when you might still be dealing with those struggles.

However, resharing them in the form of your essay collection can potentially make a difference in someone’s life. It can allow them to know that they are not isolated in their experiences. Your words can make someone feel like their life is seen, heard, felt, and potentially rescue them from a dark place.

Add your words to what people might find when they rummage through the past. 

5. Take Stock

You’ve spent years writing. You’ve persisted through criticism, negatively, doubt, and frustration to arrive at a body of work that you should be proud of. While others waited for the muse to strike, you set your butt down solidly in your chair and produced. 

Was everything you wrote Nobel laureate worthy? Of course not.

But in all your writing, you’ve surely crafted something that has the potential to uplift someone, change their bullheaded beliefs, increase their empathy, or just put a smile on their face after a particularly craptastic day. 

The fact that you amassed enough work that can be bound into a collection is an achievement worthy of celebration. It also means that your work as a writer most likely matters to someone, whether dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people, but who cares.

It all means that you haven’t written in vain. And sometimes we all just need a testament to that.

Marcus Harrison Green is the author of Readying to Rise, the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity,  and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020. You can follow him on Twitter or connect with him on Facebook.

The post #5onFri: Five Tips for Crafting an Essay Collection People Will Read appeared first on DIY MFA.

Phillip is the author of over a dozen books: 

• 4 personal essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head), as well as Being with Children, Waterfront, and Notes on Sontag
• 3 works of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and Two Marriages)
• 3 poetry collections (The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day).  

He has also edited several anthologies, including one of my personal favorites—Art of the Personal Essay—and he’s the author of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. 

He is a professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In this episode Phillip Lopate and I discuss:

• Why you need to have some things you haven’t worked out when you begin to write an essay.
• The ground rules, selection process, and organizational structure for his three volume anthology.
• What qualities make for a great essay, what can kill a piece, and the role the past plays.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate is the author of over a dozen books: 4 personal essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head), as  well as Being with Children, Waterfront, and Notes on Sontag; three works of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and Two Marriages), 3 poetry collections (The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day). He has also edited several anthologies (Art of the Personal Essay, American Movie Critics, and Writing New York). He is a professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Glorious American Essay

A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.

The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves–sometimes critically–to American values. Even in those that don’t, one can detect a subtext about being American.

The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity.

Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970

A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form.

The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America–racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them–proved fruitful topics for America’s best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time.

The Contemporary American Essay

A dazzling anthology of essays by some of the best writers of the past quarter century–from Barry Lopez and Margo Jefferson to David Sedaris and Samantha Irby–selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America’s best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic writing.

Hilton Als • Nicholson Baker • Thomas Beller • Sven Birkerts • Eula Biss • Mary Cappello • Anne Carson • Terry Castle • Alexander Chee • Teju Cole • Bernard Cooper • Sloane Crosley • Charles D’Ambrosio • Meghan Daum • Brian Doyle • Geoff Dyer • Lina Ferreira • Lynn Freed • Rivka Galchen • Ross Gay • Louise Glück • Emily Fox Gordon • Patricia Hampl • Aleksandar Hemon • Samantha Irby • Leslie Jamison • Margo Jefferson • Laura Kipnis • David Lazar • Yiyun Li • Phillip Lopate • Barry Lopez • Thomas Lynch • John McPhee • Ander Monson • Eileen Myles • Maggie Nelson • Meghan O’Gieblyn • Joyce Carol Oates • Darryl Pinckney • Lia Purpura • Karen Russell • David Sedaris • Shifra Sharlin • David Shields • Floyd Skloot • Rebecca Solnit • Clifford Thompson • Wesley Yang

If you decide to check out the books, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links: The Glorious American Essay, The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970 and The Contemporary American Essay where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 377

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 377: The Art of the American Essay Anthology – Interview with Phillip Lopate appeared first on DIY MFA.

Ana Maria is the author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going and several previous nonfiction books on nature, work, civil, indigenous, and LGBTQ rights. Her previous books include: Reclaimers, stories of elder women reclaiming sacred land and water, which was a finalist for the 2016 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2010 River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) which is a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, and two essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home. 

Her first novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14 year-old snowboarder and her activist father, released in 2017, and her first chapbook of poetry, Mile Marker Six, will appear from Finishing Line Press this fall. 

Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School, and regularly in High Country News.

After working fifteen years on backcountry trail crews for the National Park Service, she turned to teaching and is currently on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch University, Los Angeles and Western Colorado University.

In this episode Ana Maria and I discuss:

• How to write, assemble, and edit collections for two genres at the same time.
• The importance of non-writing work and why it is so valuable to the process.
• What writers of prose can learn from reading and writing poetry.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going (University of Washington Press, 2018) and several previous nonfiction books on nature, work, civil, indigenous, and LGBTQ rights, including Reclaimers, stories of elder women reclaiming sacred land and water, a finalist for the 2016 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2010 River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, and two previous essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home.  Her first novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14 year-old snowboarder and her activist father, appeared in 2017, and her first chapbook of poetry, Mile Marker Six, will appear from Finishing Line Press in Fall 2021. 

Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School, and regularly in High Country News. Her current NF work-in-progress about Chinese miners along the Columbia River in the late 1800s has received support from Washington Trust Grants for Artists Program. After working fifteen years on backcountry trail crews for the National Park Service, she turned to teaching and is currently on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch University, Los Angeles and Western Colorado University.

Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going

For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You’re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people’s lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflective essays celebrate the richness of it all: winter floods and summer fires, the roar of a chainsaw and a fiddle in the wilderness, long hikes and open-water swims, an injured bear, a lost wedding ring, and a tree in the middle of a river. Uplake reminds us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Mile Marker Six

From the back cover:

From Rancho Cucamonga to the Lost Coast, from the scablands to Tupshin Peak, Ana Maria Spagna’s debut poetry collection quakes with the full magnitude and magnificence of a life spent up close and personal with nature. Coyote pups “nose into rattlesnake weeds” and mud bees nest in knotholes under a “sky awash in waves of stars.” Taut lines etch an account of contemporary life in the Anthropocene, chronicling humanity’s effect on the earth, and just as importantly, the earth’s effect on us. “How rarely, now, we drop to our knees,” Spagna laments, “to protect what’s ours,” though she reminds us that “None of it is ours!” Tender in their recollections and observations, these poems teem with the poignancy, precision, and clarity of cut diamonds or, more accurately, splitting “a fir needle lengthwise to spare it harm.” Pulsing. Dazzling. Fierce.

–Jill McCabe Johnson, author of Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown and Diary of the One Swelling Sea

“Having read some of the poems that have become Ana Maria Spagna’s At Mile Marker Six since their beginnings, I can advise the reader to follow—follow her anywhere, into the deep, over the edge, back to brass tacks, and forward into the somewhere that is a dream of the each and the every.  Most crucially—and with a sacredness she invents through her clear-eyed, open-hearted looking—follow Spagna’s language to its precise and lyrical root.  Such is her capaciousness that the poet invites us to introduce what is known to what is felt, and that is where love roosts, not just for us, but for every made, built, or born thing.”

–Carol Ann Davis, author of The Nail in the Tree, Atlas Hour, and Psalm

Ana Maria Spagna’s words invite the reader to embrace the intrigue of the wider world. Her poems are not pretty for pretty’s sake, nor do they distract the reader from things often considered ugly. Love, wonder, and the wild are sacred but also sometimes dirty and dead. Is it dirt or is it soil? To some, it is dirt if it is smeared on your face, but soil if we are planting in it. Spagna’s poems impress upon us this: it is always dirt and it is always soil. She takes the world and pokes at it with a trailside stick – forcing us to pay attention, to gaze, to engage with each object of her noticing.

–Mara Panich, author of Blood is Not the Water

You can pre-order a copy here.

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 364: How Writing Is Like Walking a Tightrope – Interview with Ana Maria Spagna appeared first on DIY MFA.

Many of my favorite essay collections put a humorous spin on everyday life. I think finding the humor in the mundane is something we always need, but perhaps need a little bit more right now. Initially I thought this would be a pretty simple and straightforward assignment–pick five amazing collections of essays. Then I realized how hard it was to narrow it down to just five! So I hedged my bets on several of these.

Enjoy!

1) Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion. I love this woman. I named my cat Joan Didion and expect her to be called Joan Didion, not Joan. But that’s beside the point. Only not really because Didion is my favorite writer and she’s the first author I mention on this list.

This collection details Didion’s life in California during the 1960s. In her writing, she skillfully places herself front and center in the action, one of the first writers to begin doing so. Over her career, Didion has published several collections of essays and a few very powerful novels. I highly recommend her writing because she does a wonderful job of capturing the atmosphere of the setting she describes. 

2) Tiny Beautiful Things

Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of self-help columns written by Cheryl Strayed. These columns first appeared as Dear Sugar on therumpus.net with Strayed’s identity unknown to readers, though she eventually had a coming out party.

This collection is absolutely beautiful and at times utterly gut-wrenching. Through her columns as Dear Sugar, Strayed not only answers the questions posed to her, but also the question behind what is actually asked. She infuses these columns with very personal stories from her own life–unusual for an advice columnist. All the while, she advocates for something called radical empathy. Her writing here elevates what could be a simple, rote advice column into a true work of art.

3) How to Be a Woman

Caitlin Moran is hilarious. This book is a mixture of memoir and manifesto on what it is like to be a woman nowadays. Each chapter tackles a different aspect of how to be a woman in the world. She does a great job of dismantling the outdated view of feminists as man-haters and makes something that is widely accessible. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all version of feminism, but the important thing is to support one another along the way.

Moran has published two other collections of essays that run the gamut from pop culture to politics to current events and everything in between. She’s also published two fantastic novels that do such a great job of depicting the growing process from teen to adult that I sincerely wish they had been around when I was 15.

4) I Was Told There’d Be Cake

The thing I love most about Sloane Crosley’s writing is how relatable it is to my life (and I think the lives of all women who were children in the 1980s and 1990s). She is a master at putting a humorous take on everything from the mundane to the unfortunate to the genuinely funny. To give you a sense, the first essay opens with the sentence: “As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day,” then goes on to detail her secret (embarrassing) collection of ponies and what she believes it says about her.

5) Calypso

David Sedaris’s writing is pretty much a guaranteed laugh-out-loud for anyone with even a smidgen of a sense of humor. He is a master at putting a hilarious spin on life. At times, critics have claimed that his writing blurs the line between fact and fiction. To that, I say that sometimes you can’t let all of the facts get in the way of a good story. Very rarely are you able to entertain by telling things exactly as they happened; sometimes you need to add a good twist or good line to make the story worth repeating.

Sedaris has written a number of essay collections–all of which I highly recommend. Calypso just happens to be his most recently published. He’s also begun publishing his diaries, which are a very interesting read because they give you the backstory to some of his essays.

Bonus: I just can’t help myself, so here’s some other essay collections you should check out (in no particular order): Dead Girls by Alice Bolin, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby, Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith, and Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit. I could go on and on–and I feel like I’m forgetting some very huge, very important collections–but I think this is a good starting point. Enjoy!

Lori Walker is the Operations Maven at DIY MFA. Though she’s fallen off the wagon as a writer, she’s hoping to return to writing essays (perhaps even a novel!) through her involvement with DIY MFA. She also teaches yoga part-time in Smalltown, Oklahoma, where she lives with her husband and their cat, Joan Didion. You can follow her on Instagram at @LoriTheWriter.

The post #5onFri: Five Essay Collections to Check Out appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Patrice Gopo on the show!

The daughter of Jamaican immigrants who was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, Patrice is a personal essayist and often writes about topics of race, immigration, and belonging.

Her essays have appeared in numerous publications including Catapult and The New York Times. She also has had radio commentaries appear on her local public radio station, and is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellowship.

Her essay collection All the Colors We Will See was a Fall 2018 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and is available now.

So listen in as Patrice and I chat about this amazing book, the personal essay form, and finding your own personal reason for why you write.

In this episode Patrice and I discuss:

• What elevates a personal anecdote to a personal essay.
• Techniques to find your go-to essay form.
• How to overcome the fear of putting your personal stories out in the world.
• Balancing the responsibility you have to others and to yourself.
• The importance of knowing who you are as a writer.

Plus, Patrice’s #1 tip for writers.

About Patrice Gopo

Patrice Gopo is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants and was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. She is a personal essayist and often writes about topics of race, immigration, and belonging.

Patrice’s essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Catapult, Creative Nonfiction, and online in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her radio commentaries have appeared on her local public radio station, WFAE 90.7. She is also the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellowship, and her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

Patrice also has a bachelor of science in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and both a master of business administration and a master of public policy from the University of Michigan. While she is thankful she’s had the opportunity to study several different subjects, she’s also thrilled that engineering led to community development, which led to writing. Sometimes she wonders what might be next. Patrice lives with her family in North Carolina.

Her essay collection All the Colors We Will See, which was a Fall 2018 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, is now available.

To connect with Patrice check out her website at www.patricegopo.com.

And don’t forget to check out that Visual Guide to Personal Essays Patrice talked about in the interview!

All the Colors We Will See

Patrice Gopo grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, the child of Jamaican immigrants who had little experience being black in America. In All the Colors We Will See, Patrice seamlessly moves across borders of space and time to create vivid portraits of how the reality of being different affects her quest to belong.

In this poetic and often courageous weaving of writings, Patrice examines the complexities of identity in our turbulent yet hopeful time of intersecting heritages. As she digs beneath the layers of immigration questions and race relations, Patrice also turns her voice to themes such as marriage and divorce, the societal beauty standards we hold, and the intricacies of living out our faith.

With an eloquence born of pain and longing, Patrice’s reflections invite us to consider our own journeys toward belonging, challenging us to wonder if the very differences dividing us might bring us together after all.

If you decide to check out Patrice’s essay collection—All the Colors We Will See—or the book she mentioned by Priscilla Long—The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life—we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 251

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Google Play and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 251: Finding Your Why — Interview with Patrice Gopo appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today I am so excited to be talking with Will Dowd on the show!

Will Dowd is a writer and artist from the Boston area. He earned a BA from Boston College, an MS from MIT,and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University.

His writing and art have appeared in many notable places, including LitHub and Tin House online. Will’s debut collection of essays, Areas of Fog, which takes readers on the whimsical and unpredictable journey of one year of New England weather, was released by Etruscan press in November 2017.

Listen in as we chat about this thought-provoking essay collection, and staying true to your voice even when the world tries to dampen it.

In this episode Will and I discuss:

• Finding the unique but universal concept for your writing to latch on to.
• Learning to turn down the volume of your inner critic.
• How the argumentative nature of the internet affects the personal essay.
• What techniques to use to craft an essay, with an example from Will.
• The importance of being compassionate with yourself as a writer.

Plus, Will’s #1 tip for writers.

About Will Dowd

Will Dowd is a writer and artist from the Boston area. He earned a BA from Boston College, as a Presidential Scholar; an MS from MIT, as a John Lyons Fellow; and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, as a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. His writing and art have appeared in numerous places, including LitHub, Tin House online, Post Road Magazine, and NPR[dot]org. His debut collection of essays, Areas of Fog, was published by Etruscan Press, and is now available.

To connect with Will check out his website at www.willdowd.net.

Areas of Fog

Will Dowd takes us on a whimsical journey through one year of New England weather in this engaging collection of essays. As unpredictable as its subject, Areas of Fog combines wit and poetry with humor and erudition. A fun, breezy, and discursive read, it is an intellectual game that exposes the artificiality of genres, that in the author’s own words is, “a collection of lyric essays touching on literature, history and the vicissitudes of New England weather.”

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Google Play and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 198: Let’s Talk About the Weather — Will Dowd Discusses the Personal Essay appeared first on DIY MFA.