Modern Day Ghost Stories

In contemporary memoir, like works by Kiese Laymon and Jesmyn Ward, the ghosts that haunt the narrators are past selves, dead loved ones, or other traumas that manifest in these writers’ lives.

Fact and Fiction in Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive

Reading both of Valeria Luiselli’s most recent books, which each center on the refugee crisis at the US-Mexico border, is a powerful experience—doing so can show us our own complicity in what is often a “background story.”

Jane Alison and Ander Monson on Narrative Form

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The arc can only take narrative so far before it crashes, particularly when it comes to personal writing.

“The writer’s toolbox is for everyone”: An Interview with T Kira Madden

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T Kira Madden’s new memoir is ultimately redemptive—it is a book about growing back from brokenness and finding love after a childhood spent longing for it.

Dirty Realism, Veteran Transition, and Contemporary War Literature

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Somewhere between “fiction” and “nonfiction” sits the military veteran, pen and paper in hand, wondering why they lived while their friends died.

The Narrative Messiness of Chronic Illness

Memoirs from Paul Kalanithi, Lucy Grealy, Jean-Dominique Bauby, and Porochista Khakpour teach us about turning the story of an ailing body into a work of art.

Hybridity in Color

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Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, and Marie NDiaye destabilize categories like genre and color as a way of moving forward with exploring the disturbances found within personhood.

Finding Communion in Disability Poetics

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If young ladies should be seen and not heard, that goes double for young ladies with disabilities. When your body declares itself Other, your personhood fades behind it. So mine did, until I discovered disability poetics.

Sculpting Flesh From Text in My Body is a Book of Rules

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How to control the body is a constant theme in Washuta’s work.

Alternatives to Blast Open the Forms of Nonfiction

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Today’s nonfiction writers have at hand a number of forms other than the essay and the memoir. There’s the flash essay, of course, and literary journalism. Then there’s the catch-all form of nonfiction known as the lyric essay. So, what do they all mean?