It is now almost two years that I am at Athens, and I have sent to you many letters, but I have not received any answer of ...

The Wishing Well, Summer 1979. All images reproduced with permission of the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

I was trying to get down to the root where consciousness springs up under pressure from conflict and pain and power.” ...

Write a story in which the narrator refuses to tell the story. Permit the narrator to come close to telling the story—perhaps ...

I am partial to sentences with this framework: “There are two kinds of [ ]: those who [ ], and those who [ ].” The setup should, ideally, involve a chiasmus or double entendre or any florid rhetorical ...

January 29, 2015 – W. H. Auden was a professor at the University of Michigan for the 1941–42 academic year. His course was called Fate and the Individual in European ...

February 19, 2015 – André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t ...

On Yeats’s assertion that one must choose between the life and the work: “Of course, if by life you mean life with other people, Yeats's dictum is true. Writing requires huge amounts of solitude.” ...

October 26, 2012 – “TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”Daniel Horowitz takes on Poe’s classic 1843 tale of ...

Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A ...

I named her Holy Jemima when I was nine, or thereabouts. I liked the way the words sounded and it was meant cruelly. Holy Jemima was two years older than me, and her family—her mother, father, two ...