May/Summer 2012 
Not for the Faint of Heart: Bonnie Jo Campbell on Writing
Heather Sappenfield
..awareness of my audience improved my writing. I’m still trying to write something that interests readers.
That boarding house was really something.
Read more...
Memoir: It Has to be True: An Interview with James Brown
Duff Brenna
Writing memoir is a tricky deal, and you’re constantly questioning yourself, what you want to reveal to the world about yourself, how far you’re really willing to go, and what you’d prefer to carry with you to the grave.
Read more...
What Writers Need to Know About Electronic Publishing
Ronald Goldfarb
A recent New York Times article noted that the publishing landscape is changing fundamentally for the first time since the Gutenberg Bible was created 600 years ago. For example, by providing “end-to-end service,” Amazon now creates a challenge to bookstores, publishers, and literary agents.
Read more...
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Abstraction?: Modes of Conveying Emotion
David Jauss
Most creative writing instruction is inevitably negative—it’s a lot easier to tell apprentice writers what they should avoid doing than what they should do—but few aspects of craft are taught more negatively than the all-important subject of conveying emotion.
Read more...
.Anything! How the Next Dotcom Boom Might Cost Writers More Than Just Their Money
Patrick Toland
So how do you get the ante money to join the ICANN poker game? You could attempt to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—that would clear you over a million dollars. The Griffin Prize for poetry could bag you $200,000...
Read more...
Writing For Free
Robin Hemley
I can’t think of another activity that gives away its labor as we writers do. Imagine if we all did what we do for the love of it. We’d be a bunch of commies, wouldn’t we? Yes, I suppose. Guilty as charged.
Read more...
An Interview with Tom Sleigh
Micah Towery
Seeing the site of a massacre through the eyes of a young Red Cross worker who picked up the bodies and tried to save the dying only hours after an American-made jet launched an American-made missile that killed an entire extended family huddling in their house—
that changes you.
Read more...
Shirley Jackson & Her Demon Lover
Susan Scarf Merrell
Not many readers know the name Stanley Edgar Hyman. He’s all but vanished from the roster of last century’s great literary minds, although in his heyday—from the mid-1940s until his death in 1970—he was one of our most important public intellectuals.
Read more...
