From “Think For Yourself,” by Dan Chiasson for The New York Review of Books:
I had two ideas for this paragraph: before I decided on Bishop, I considered, instead, describing the little pools of saturated ink in the manuscript poems of Emily Dickinson, where she paused and rested her pen while gathering thought for her next astonishing turn. You can actually see the thinking, in those slightly darker splotches, and even estimate its duration—the darker the splotch, the longer the hesitation.
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English departments and other communities of writers and readers must become intentional communities, like communes or religious orders, where a strict code of conduct is expected for inclusion in good standing. Liberal arts colleges should support these little hives of readers and writers and hold them up as models for how to exist as a human in time.
From “A Novel is Not a Machine: On the Pleasure of Encountering Something New,” by Walter Mosley, for LitHub:
But a novel is not a machine. Or, more accurately, it is not a device that has a singular function…Every reader reads, and in some ways creates a different book in their mind. The characters have a unique look in each and every mind’s eye. The reasons that are given in the fiction are scrutinized and understood in as many ways as there are readers, maybe even more, seeing that even an individual reader might apprehend the world one way today and then, sometime later, they might have a completely different worldview.
Sarah Gailey, on Bluesky:
There is a little Martin Luther that lives inside me, he marches around with his “95 Theses or: Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of What That Motherfucker Did” and it is my job to keep taking away his hammer and nails
