March/April 2019 
Naming the Animal: An Interview with Ada Limón
Lisa Buckton
I’ll be honest, as a female writer, I think that there’s a level too where we can be a little afraid to be direct because the confessional has always been so rooted in the female voice and put down.
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Beyond Plot: Structuring Fiction
David Jauss
…for much of the last century or more, even fiction writers who swear by conventional causal plots have been looking for new ways to structure them.
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Poetry, the Dangers of Realism, & the Revisionist Powers of Fantasy
Tony Hoagland
Realism is a powerful state of mind. It gets things done, but its shadow side is fatalism, pessimism, and certainty, and when wielded like a club, as it often is, it can reduce us to a state of hopelessness.
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The Heart is a Thing if What We’re Talking About is My Mind: An Interview with Paul Guest
Jasmine V. Bailey
I feel pretty hopeful about young people. About the students I am lucky enough to work with every day. This weird moment we’re in now, as awful as it is, will end. The earth may be ruined for them but they will be better people.
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The Fine Art of Containment in Creative Nonfiction
Brenda Miller
While a short essay might lend itself to being restricted inside small vessels, container scenes can also be particularly useful when holding together a longer essay that moves through time and space.
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Vivid with Character: Vital Signs in Merrill’s Late Body of Work
Daniel Groves
In Merrill’s later poems especially, meaning is encoded most subtly (and, it may seem, infallibly) in the ‘resonances’ of allusion and pun…
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The Art of Losing (and Other Visions of Revision)
Philip Metres
Revision and its discontents have been around as long as writing. Much of the talk about revision is about loss—the pain of cutting away favorite lines, stanzas, digressions, scenes, characters, etc. Of course it can hurt.
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