Last year, I interviewed Pam Houston about her novel Contents May Have Shifted and the fine line between fact and fiction. “Well, I don’t think of it as a fine line,” she wrote to me in an email. My task as a writer has always been to take the

  Rituals, especially those practiced for a long time, often lose meaning for an adherer. Even those rituals that at first glance might seem strange can, over time, have their profundity sucked dry and their practices turn rote. In Ashley Hutson’s flash fiction piece, “The Hen of God,” (The

Recently I was looking at some art in a friend’s apartment when she and her husband shared with me their tradition of making a painting each year on their anniversary. One begins on the canvas and the other finishes. Neither of them is a painter by profession—she’s a poet,

Writers should understand how to use color because seeing “red”and reading the word “red” can evoke the same heightened emotion. Our perception, behavior and mood can be influenced by color. Reaction to color is part of our evolutionary biology. The color blue, for example, is associated with the nighttime and

One of the most profound depictions of memory in literature is immortalized in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The Madeleine Moment, as it is often called, exists in Proust’s seven-volume novel, where the narrator is swamped by memories when he dunks a madeleine, a sort of cake,