The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “writing”

A Living Obituary: Faulkner’s Beautiful Epitaph for Himself
A Living Obituary: Faulkner’s Beautiful Epitaph for Himself

“He made the books and he died.”

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The Value of Not Understanding Everything: Grace Paley’s Advice to Aspiring Writers
The Value of Not Understanding Everything: Grace Paley’s Advice to Aspiring Writers

“Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious.”

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Neil Gaiman on How Stories Last
Neil Gaiman on How Stories Last

“Stories … are genuinely symbiotic organisms that we live with, that allow human beings to advance.”

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Saul Bellow’s Spectacular Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on How Art and Literature Ennoble the Human Spirit
Saul Bellow’s Spectacular Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on How Art and Literature Ennoble the Human Spirit

“Only art penetrates … the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”

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The Midwifery of Creativity: Beloved Poet Denise Levertov on How a Great Work of Art Is Born
The Midwifery of Creativity: Beloved Poet Denise Levertov on How a Great Work of Art Is Born

On giving shape to the stimulus “selected by some interior mysterious process out of all the other minutes and hours.”

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The Art of Constructive Criticism: Trailblazing Feminist Margaret Fuller Rejects Young Thoreau and Helps Him Improve His Writing
The Art of Constructive Criticism: Trailblazing Feminist Margaret Fuller Rejects Young Thoreau and Helps Him Improve His Writing

“I can have no advice or criticism for a person so sincere; but, if I give my impression of him, I will say, ‘He says too constantly of Nature, she is mine.’ She is not yours till you have been more hers.”

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How to Own Your Story: Vivian Gornick on the Art of Personal Narrative and Nuanced Storytelling
How to Own Your Story: Vivian Gornick on the Art of Personal Narrative and Nuanced Storytelling

“The memoirist … must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom — or rather the movement toward it — that counts.”

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The Subterranean River of Emotion: Cheryl Strayed on Writing, the Art of Living with Opposing Truths, and the Three Ancient Motifs in All Great Storytelling
The Subterranean River of Emotion: Cheryl Strayed on Writing, the Art of Living with Opposing Truths, and the Three Ancient Motifs in All Great Storytelling

“When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.”

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Teenage Sylvia Plath’s Letters to Her Mother on the Joy of Living and Writing as Salvation and Sustenance for the Spirit
Teenage Sylvia Plath’s Letters to Her Mother on the Joy of Living and Writing as Salvation and Sustenance for the Spirit

“I want to be affected by life deeply, but never so blinded that I cannot see my share of existence in a wry, humorous light…”

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An Animating Presence: Dani Shapiro on the Quest for a Connected Consciousness
An Animating Presence: Dani Shapiro on the Quest for a Connected Consciousness

The art of holding up one’s own end of the dialogue.

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