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How an Exile’s Return to Iran Inspired a Novel
Strange things happened when I returned to Tehran in 2010 after 32 years in exile. Arriving past midnight, when many of the international flights land, I sipped lukewarm coffee while waiting for my...
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Culture vs. Nurture: When Family Hierarchy Informs Fiction
When you grow up a fatherless daughter of a fatherless mother, where does your outlook on family begin? Culture? Nurture? My mother worked hard, partied harder, and resembled a movie star when dolled...
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The Crime Novelist Who Writes Poetry
There are few people who know I write poetry as my work is rarely shared and to date none of my poems have ever been published. My work as a crime novelist leaves me completely exposed to critique on...
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Construction Instead of College, and Ways to Live in the World
Start on a spring day, drowsy with pollen, watching the sun shine on the new leaves outside the window while a class of some description droned on. This was the eleventh grade. I hadn’t read the book....
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How An 80-Year-Old Murder Inspired My Present-Day Novel
Seven years ago, I interviewed the local historian of a small New England village. We met in a crumbling cottage, the town’s historical society. I was reporting a story for a magazine. After an hour,...
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The Weird Stenographer: Sam Shepard on His Long Writing Life
Sam Shepard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, and American avant-garde icon died Thursday at his home in Kentucky from complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was 73. He often spoke of...
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Marlon James Needs Noise to Write (and Other Revelations)
In this episode, Paul Holdengraber talks to the writer Marlon James about why he hates the word inspiration, Joan Didion, staying in the present of a story, why writing is work, and why he can’t write...
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A Formidable Writer, An Exceptional Man: Philip Roth on Richard Stern
In memory of Richard Stern. I met Dick in the fall of 1956, and thus was initiated a 57-year-long literary conversation and friendship. In 1956, Dick had only recently joined the English department of...
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How Shania Twain Made Me a Writer
In eighth grade, I had a social studies teacher who was tall and imposing, with a bold mustache. He wasn’t easily won over. As a kid who was always eager to please my parents and teachers, I really,...
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What Does Your Life Teach You About Becoming a Writer?
I hadn’t been living on Glenville Avenue with Giff, Nick, and Paul very long when a girl who’d recently graduated from Boston University in physics—and with whom, clandestinely, I’d been prowling...
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How Fetishizing ‘Craft’ Can Get in the Way of a Good Poem
There is a reason why writers like the word “craft.” They evoke it as a kind of one-word incantation, a defense against chaos: the visionary writer-as-carpenter who frames the room to hold that elusive...
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