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writing 11

Writing for the Common Good

I can relate the vice of envy most closely with my own writing, because that’s my profession, and I’ve longed to be a professional novelist since I was in elementary…
February 11, 2025

In Praise of the Inefficient

This year I’m renewing my commitment to the sentence.
February 7, 2025

The AI Invasion: For Humans, It’s Becoming Harder to Write

No question about it: For writers like me, who would like nothing more than to do our own writing and thinking with dignity and intellectual honesty, it’s becoming harder to…
January 30, 2025

Marking the Year on Two Calendars: An Interview with Matthew Miller

Knowledge is a path to love, and so I’m bound to say that the book did change my affection for the place.

Do-able Simplicities: On Letter Writing and Fountain Pens

Holding the letters was a delicate experience, noting the brittle nature of the paper, being careful not to let them tear at the aged folds, and yet the blue ink,…
November 28, 2024

Large Language Models and the Final Paragraph

Like the sonnet, the five-paragraph essay traps investment in truth felt in the heart and forged in the mind by means of its life-respecting limitations.

Working for the Life Beyond Words

In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem…

A Conversation with Katy Carl on Place, Fiction, and Contemplation

Conjuring makes me think of force and manipulation, which as writers we have to forswear. Readers will either notice they're being manipulated and throw our books aside—or maybe worse, they…
Seth Wieck
August 28, 2023

Why I Wish I Didn’t Have a Smartphone and Computer (But Probably Won’t Give Them Up)

We can agree that many technological “advances” have objectively done more harm than good, in terms of the human condition as well as the Earth, and that we face a…
December 12, 2022

Of Dullards, Whales, Frustrations, and Shirts Like Fetters

What of those who have never once thought it their duty to amuse their readers?
Jason Peters
May 18, 2011

On the Logic and Nature of Blogging

Phoenix, Arizona. Because of my involvement with this darn site I have been attending to the blogosphere much more than heretofore, and lately have been trying to get a handle…
Jeremy Beer
June 8, 2009