What am I supposed to do with autofiction? Where is it shelved, literally and mentally? Is it memoir or fiction? Pick a lane.
The political essay has never been a clearly defined genre. David Hume may have legitimated it in 1758 when he classified under a collective rubric his own Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. “…
Don't know the difference between memoir and autobiography? Check out this handy breakdown of their similarities and differences.
"Hermit crab" essays can take many forms, both natural and not
By Shelley Wright As an English teacher, I’ve had numerous conversations with college professors who lament the writing skills of their first year students. But not all writing. Most students are capable of solid expository writing. It’s their skill with persuasive writing that’s the problem. Specifically, they’re weak at writing a thesis statement that can be
There’s a reason that people hide their diaries: they’re private conversations with close, and silent confidants. That’s also the reason people want to read them. No self-respecting teenager who di…
Rachel Howard, author of "The Risk of Us," recommends autofiction
Why the hottest literary trend of the last decade is so blindingly white
The Blunt Instrument is an advice column for writers. If you need tough advice for a writing problem, send your question to [email protected]. Dear Blunt Instrument, I’ve been sitting on an essay that deals with an extended family member’s private story for about two years, and I’d like to send it out for publication. I […]
Asked at the start of the final 1988 presidential debate whether he would support the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered, Michael Dukakis, a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, quickly and coolly said no. It was a surprising, deeply personal, and arguably inappropriate question, but in demonstrating an unwavering commitment to his […]
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I used to fear the prospect of spending hours on an essay that might meander its way into the ground. This is the dilemma …
Phillip Lopate spoke to Literary Hub about the new anthology he has edited, The Glorious American Essay. He recounts his own development from an “unpatriotic” young man to someone, later in life, w…
When Sonja Livingston began to write about her life with an itinerant mother and six siblings in the raw corners of western New York, she wrote, she says, in snatches. “I wrote of living in apartme…
When young writers, particularly would-be journalists, ask me for advice about improving their thinking as well as their writing, I tell them to consider some topic about which they have strong per…
When people are trying to persuade you, they sometimes reach for tricks like the 'appeal to ignorance' or 'whataboutism' to seem more convincing.
As accommodating as they are to subject matter and formal experimentation, essays permit no substitutes; every piece of short nonfiction prose is not an essay. And yet, it is sometimes difficult fo…
From the first draft of Lost in the Reflecting Pool I struggled with whether this story should be presented as a memoir or a work of fiction. Not only was I concerned with protecting the people I was…
The poet’s kaleidoscopic essay collection asks ‘How do we make sense of what we see?’ – from photographs and sculptures to weather and human faces
It seems everyone prefers digging their heels in and remaining steadfast in their opinions (even if they happen to be, say, scientifically invalid
She considered herself something of a failure – but the revered singer-songwriter’s autobiography shows her to be one of a kind
10 questions about writing with author and Catapult instructor Jason Schwartzman
And what’s more important, the auto or the fiction?
The haunted narrative of "In the Dream House" shows that memoir and gothic novels have more in common than you think
Easy back to school dinner ideas! These fun weeknight dinners are kid-approved and perfect for picky eaters.
In creative nonfiction, how much of your life can you embellish? It’s a question many writers ask, and the answer is simple: the line between fact and fiction exists for a reason.
This is another case of you getting the solution for you. Once he has described the optimal solution for you, he can’t go back on what he has already said without looking like a fool. On top of that…
This toddler friendship activity is easy and fun to make and is a simple reminder that we are all friends in our classroom. Free printable!
Hier findest du 25 Rezepte für die Heißluftfritteuse. Schnapp dir deinen Air Fryer und probier dich durch!
A couple of weeks before my thirtieth birthday, I was less consumed with aging and more with finishing my first book. I felt stalled as an impending deadline approached, so I assigned myself a pers…
Why does one write at all? After some 60 years spent in this pursuit, I still scarcely know. The first of my writings to be printed was, at the age of 10, a prize-winning essay in Little Folks. For…
Before wokeness became a hashtag on the internet, there was a refrain on Erykah Badu’s “Master Teacher,” a collaboration with Bilal and Georgia Anne Muldrow, where they rotate singing the words “I …
In 1934, in curious approximation of a correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, titled, “Why War?,” Virginia Woolf published an essay with the cryptic title, “Why?” It was a call t…
For several years, writers have debated which texts fall under the umbrella of autofiction. Now, it seems, autofiction denotes a category of autobiographical fiction that knowingly plays with its t…
When my first book, a memoir about my time in the Marines called Eat the Apple, was published back in 2018, I did an event at Powell’s with a fellow writer, Matt Robinson, who’d written an amazing …
Some years ago I was invited to judge a literature prize. The prize was awarded on the basis of a writer’s body of work, but the prize organizers had limited the scope to works of fiction. Works of…
“Perhaps the lyric essay is an occasion to take what we typically set aside between parentheses and liberate that content—a chance to reevaluate what a text is actually about. Peripherals as center…
In a 2020 piece in The New Republic titled “Can a Black Novelist Write Autofiction,” novelist Tope Folarin argues that, by design of the publishing industry, the artistic movement that is “autofict…
1. The conceit of a memoir is that the important parts are all mostly there, and the unimportant parts are all mostly left out. But since memoirs can’t write into the future, I can’t bring myself t…
I was going through my notebooks the other day when I came across a piece of paper; a torn scrap on which I’d written hurriedly a name and the plot number of a grave. Writing a family story is a qu…
The essay is a shape-shifter, a slippery and indefinable form. Just when you think you know what constitutes an essay, you’ll read one that changes your understanding. We learn how to write what we…
Mary Laura Philpott is the guest. Her new memoir, Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives, is out now from Atria Books. Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! F…
To determine what defies the memoir genre, we first need to agree what memoir is. Originally stemming from the Latin memoria—to remember—in the broadest terms, memoirs see us committing our memorie…
While it might seem obvious to suggest that a work of many pages, or multiple chapters, could hold more truth than a piece of prose short enough to fit on one page, the opposite view has always had…
