I’m lucky enough to be acquainted with writer Casey Plett, from the days when I was covering the literary world and she was a publicist for the indie Canadian press Biblioasis, which happens to be the publisher of her recent long personal essay, On Community. So I was delighted to see her launch the book a few months ago at McNally Jackson in Manhattan, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what she’s written since then. Some of what she says draws upon her experience growing up in Mennonite communities, some of it draws upon her experience in literary communities, and some of it draws upon her ..read more

Recently, someone steered me toward a GQ profile of golf coach George Gankas: Gankas’s great flaw as a player, in retrospect, was fear. Now he teaches his students to overwhelm fear with acceptance. Stay present, he says. When you’re out on the golf course, don’t get too sunk into yourself; look up from the ball, at the beauty of the natural world, and get outside your own traitorous body, your own monstrous ego. “For me, to always look up and out is huge because I can see detail in the trees,” Gankas told me. “It gets me present. It gets me out of my head.” He said that lately his eyesight ..read more

When the Romance Writers of America presented an award for “Best Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements” to Karen Witemeyer for her novel At Love’s Command, several of the genre’s fans (including a number of writers) were extremely pissed at this decision, arguing that a former officer in the United States cavalry who had participated in the massacre at Wounded Knee, even a fictional one, should not be held up as a hero in a historical romance novel. That sounded reasonable to me on general principle, but as I noted on Twitter, it was entirely possible the hero had engaged in a searing ..read more

In my thirties, I started listening seriously to modern classical music, to the point that I was able to distinguish between John Adams and John Luther Adams—and it’s the latter composer I’ll be talking about now, as I’ve recently had occasion to read his memoir, Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska. As you might guess, a good portion of the book is about moving to Alaska as a young man, setting himself up in a cabin in the woods, and working on his music in isolation. “I would roll out of bed in the morning, crawl down the ladder from the sleeping loft, and find myself standing in the m ..read more

As the publication date for Our Endless and Proper Work draws near, I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote from the actor Mads Mikkelsen: “My approach to what I do in my job—and it might even be the approach to my life—is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film.… I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my car ..read more

I should confess at the onset: I’ve swiped the title of today’s newsletter from GB “Doc” Burford and his excellent essay, “You Are Capable of Writing Better Horror Stories.” And though I’m going to tell you a little bit about it here, I strongly encourage you to go read the whole thing. Burford is a video game consultant and “narrative designer,” and his essay springs out of a sense of frustration that came from playing a number of video games that all felt the same: “So, there’s this protagonist, and he’s just arrived at an isolated location. Maybe there are some people around, but usually n ..read more

Chavisa Woods’ 100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism is a book that, as our British friends say, does exactly what it says on the tin—chronicling 100 separate incidents of sexist behavior that Woods has faced in her lifetime, a pattern of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse (including sexual assault) that starts when she’s five years old and continues to the present day. It’s a patten that, I speculated, just about any woman should find instantly recognizable, to which Woods replied: “I keep saying a lot of memoirs are written because the author thinks it’s an exceptional story. I actually felt li ..read more

In The Long Accomplishment, Rick Moody takes readers through the first year of his second marriage. It was a moment in time where he’d gained significant control over his addictions, and had extricated from a dysfunctional first marriage—a moment when, as I jokingly said during our conversation, “everything should be coming up Rick Moody.” But it didn’t go that way; instead, we have an account of a couple grappling with the financial and emotional tolls of fertility treatment, along with various other assaults from the outside world… and, as Moody describes it, a shutdown of his creative facu ..read more