I’ve been away longer than I meant to be. More on that another time; today, the essay — and especially the personal essay.

I’m writing from a castle in Scotland, on a residency, in a house with shelves of old memoirs and autobiographies going back to the seventeenth century. Looking them over, and reading them during little writing breaks, has reminded me, as the site director here put it at dinner, that “memoirs” once referred to a specific experience—“my memoirs of my time in the Peninsular war”—and autobiography to the task of looking back on a life as a whole.

We still have both kinds of books in our literary ecosystem, but we tend not to call them “autobiography.” Which made me wonder what we mean by “personal” in personal essay, and what that word is doing up against “essay” — a noun that comes from the French essai, an attempt. Montaigne’s Essais take up anything and everything, but each one reflects on a problem and arrives at a solution that could only be his.

I’ve been reading a great deal of personal essays drafts lately for something I’m judging. That reading, too, got me thinking about what separated the good ones from the ordinary or not-so-good; the result of my thinking is this list of personal essay principles. Here are ten things I think a personal essay does, ideally:

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Rest in peace Dolly Parton: I don’t know if you, like me, ended up spending hours revisiting her clips online. The boys hadn’t really ever listened to her and now they are walking about singing “Jolene.” I read them her quote about how to live: “Find out who you are, and do it on purpose.”

My editor sent me a letter this week about my book manuscript with her suggestions for spot to revisit or rethink: the perfect end of summer task to look forward to. We’re out on the North Fork but get back to real life next week. My new book begins, in its current form, with the physical and emotional experience of early motherhood, and eventually opens outward — or so I hope — into a wider meditation on the way our life is always close to that other world of not-being, which I call the “partum.” In a sense it’s a kind of monologue about the way we all live more proximately to not-being in this world than we know. We are reminded of this by birth, by death, by aging, by trauma or accident, by chronic illness, and at those key moments in our lives when we undertake a passage between selves. (The painful proximity to the other world right beyond our grasp that change brings with it is probably why most of us get stuck in ruts!) When I had babies, I was struck by the fact that caring for an infant is strangely much like caring for an aging or dying parent.

My editor’s central note was, essentially, to say and show me a version of this: you go deep on the subjects you are most drawn to, and you jump away from the one you find harder to tackle ), and the avoidance shows up as a kind of structural imbalance that the reader can feel.

She was right. In the current draft of Partum I go into the textures of motherhood at length, from every angle, because I love that material and it was easy to write. But in the same draft, when I turn to the secondary thread — pieces of family history, the death of my father, and meditations on father’s legacy, as a very complicated and also brilliant man— I tend to drop a fact and skip on. It’s very painful to think about my father and his death (in some ways , that is the core premise of the book). But I hadn’t realized that I tend to offer up one sentence, and then retreat to the safer, richer terrain of the feeling of holding an infant on my body. For me, the writing about my father felt so hard won, and so replete. It has been interesting to see that it doesn’t feel fully on the page yet to others. But it makes sense, too: the part that came hardest might be the one that still needs attention.

I wanted to share this here not to litigate the specifics of my own book, which I am still drafting, but because the diagnosis my editor gave is one I often give writers when I am editing their work, and it reminded me of something we should all hold closer to mind…

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What have you been reading? I need new recommendations. I’ve been rereading and reading some worthwhile new books: Maya Popa’s If You Love That Lady (luminous and lucid, philosophical, deeply structured poems about love and its eviscerations and remakings of us); Rachel Cusk’s The Life of M, which I tend to think is not being reviewed/read as carefully as it demands to be; rereading Nathalie Leger’s Suite for Barbara Loden (extraordinary, highly recommend–and it’s short). Anything good on your reader?

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As for the work at hand, in my last post I wrote about structure, and I got a number of excellent questions from you, so this follow-up post addresses those. Keep them coming! And I’ll be back with a new post soon.

How do you braid disparate storylines together?

Braiding disparate story lines together is a way to create more opportunities for suspense and drama, as well as a way to enact certain kinds of realizations through structure (rather than by clunkily telling the reader with exposition). The virtue of, say, writing a memoir with a storyline in the present and lots of flashbacks is that the flashbacks seem real and present — they enact the past coming through into the present, rather than the present tense narrator having to stop and explain things to the reader. This is a version of what I did in The Long Goodbye, which had a present-day story line of losing and mourning my mother, with lots of flashbacks. There’s almost always a spine (one primary logic) and secondary ones are layered within or around that.

One thing I have found typically to be true….

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Happy Summer! I’m back from a series of gigs and travel that took me away from posting. Looking forward to being here more consistently! June brought me to Provence for a week at the Mediterranean Artist Project with other editors, with a focus on building international connections. Talking to book and magazine editors based in San Francisco, Athens, Cairo, and Berlin made me realize how American-centric our culture is. Not all of it, I know: I’m sure many of you are not. For example, the folks at Transit Books, who were at the conference, do a great job of bringing international writers to the United States. I love what they do.

I do try to read a lot of literature in translation—I gravitate toward writers like Annie Ernaux, Guadalupe Nettel, and Samanta Schweblin—and yet there is still so much that flies past me. For example, I hadn’t tracked this Berlin-based magazine, Delfi, that seems very up my alley (the editors were at the conference and we had a fun swimming in a chilly calanque on a very warm day). Send shoutouts if you’ve read anything you think I might like. I’m looking for something to read on my trip to teach at NYU in Paris this week.

Some bits of news: My former student and Yale Review associate editor Lacey Jones has a great new essay up at The Audacity as part of the Emerging Writers Series. I had a new poem out in The New Yorker two weeks ago. It’s called “Sectioned,” and it’s about the birth of my first child. And I was a guest editor over at Passerby, where I explained how Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (yes!) helped me kickstart a project this year.

Last but hardly least: in late May, I turned in my new book, Partum, which Riverhead has accepted! It’s about the death of my father and birth of my first sons; it’s a kind of monologue from a woman in extremis, set within a particular compressed time frame. So that will be coming your way once I get notes and do another pass. I suspect it will be published in early 2028.

Today I want to talk about structure and offer some prompts and key thoughts to understanding the work that structure does.

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So today I wanted to write about residencies. I had nearly forgotten what they’re really for, and what they can do for you if you need it.

We often talking about needing time to write, though we what we most mean, as I’ve talked about before, is protected time: time defended from all the pressing (or not-so-pressing) that weigh on one’s mind, and make it hard to write. Small tasks like calling a plumber to fix a minor leak, the email, the dishes, clothes for your kids’ dance concert, the slow administrative drip of responsibilities, which also require a constant, draining, switching of internal identities. But until I went back to MacDowell in April—this was my third time, but my first residency since the kids were born—I’d forgotten that time and space are only part of the gift a residency offers. The real gift is being taken seriously as an artist, and the deep nourishment of your identity as an artist. I did not know how depleted I was until I spent two weeks somewhere where I was an artist, and that was it. It allowed a deeper kind of focus.

I had persuaded myself I didn’t need any of this. I have two young kids; going away for two weeks seemed hard, even indulgent. But within three days at MacDowell, I realized how wrong I’d been. My older son is nine and a half, and I suddenly thought, I have not really been writing for nine and a half years. On the third day, I’d done all the small edits I owed and I thought, What should I do now? — and realized, Now I can think. In that moment I made discoveries about the form of the book I was working on and wrote three sections I hadn’t anticipated, sections that I think made the book immeasurably better. What a residency offers is not all lightness and wonder; sometimes, that time allows grief and fear to intrude, which are also, like boredom, important parts of writing that I almost never experience because my available time is in such short supply. I have had pockets of time to work: I do travel a lot, in my life as a writer, and often get to write in hotels, or in places where I won’t be interrupted by small voices asking for more mango— but what MacDowell offered, over nearly three weeks, with all necessities taken care of, offered a level of concentration that I have not had in a decade.

I realized that forevermore I’ll be making a two-week residency part of my practice. After all, though it seems indulgent, it is essential to have the focused time; I realized that if you’re an actress and you’re in a play on Broadway or off-Broadway, you go every night to the theater. You just have to do it to make your art. A film actress travels to her set. The same is true for being a writer. We do need to go to our set (our mind), and for me it was a transformative experience that I will be carrying forward. And: although I was nervous about leaving my kids, it was definitely manageable for them at this age (9 and 7). In fact, they wrote a murder mystery while I was away and texted it to me in installments — as if they were having their own private MacDowell.

Below is a working list of residencies I’d recommend, organized loosely from most well-known and selective to lesser-known and more accessible. One issue is that some residencies have a minimum time amount that is pretty long, like four or six weeks (which I find astonishing in this day and age - it’s not at all friendly to working parents, or primary caregivers of any kind, especially those who are the bearer of the mental load of caregiving, which is usually a kind of artist who most needs a residency. What can we do to make this inequity issue much more visible to institutions? I’ve been thinking a lot about this and talking about it with some. I see that Saltonstall has special one-week caregiver residencies, which is a fantastic model, one that more places need to embrace.

A note: deadlines, fees, and stipends often change, so confirm everything against the residency’s own site before applying. Remember: there is always something arbitrary about applying. Apply more than once—consider this my words of encouragement to keep trying (and keep working on your application, making it stronger each time.)

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Hello, dear readers,

Last week I opened the spring office hours with questions about getting published in magazines, and talked about pitching, writing cover letters, and knowing when work is ready. A few of you wrote me with questions about agents, book proposals, questions I’ll try to answer here. This week, a new issue of The Yale Review (which I’m executive editor of) is out, and I also did a Q&A with other wonderful editors with the brilliant Alia Hanna Habib of Delivery & Acceptance about publishing in magazines, so my mind is on the ins and outs of publishing. And also on the fact that the huge pile of snow outside my house is finally gone! My car is permanently dented by trying to turn into our driveway and hitting the mini-glaciers left by plows and shovelers, but at least spring is almost here, and the daffodils and crocus tops are peeking up and out.

This winter, I happened to give a number of talks to a variety of audiences, from high schoolers to MFA students to lifelong writers, and I was struck that often what people ask me about (or just want to talk about) is the large, hard question underneath all the practical ones, which is simply: how do you build a writing life?

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There’s no one answer, of course, and anyone who promises to have “the” answer is full of hogwash, a word my kids like to say. (I just realized I didn’t know the orign of that word—it turns out that the original 15th century meaning was “garbage food you’d give a hog,” which turned quickly into “garbage communication,” as it were.) There’s no way to game the system. The time you spend alone with your work — uncertain, revising, not yet sure what you have — is not wasted time. It is, in fact, the only time that is entirely yours, and the only time in which you can keep improving the work on your own terms. Hasten slowly, as Emperor Augustus reportedly said.

With that as the frame are a few questions you’ve asked and my attempts to answer them.

On Agents: What They’re For, and When You Need One

I’ve seen so much skepticism about agents and publishing here on Substack and surely some of it is merited. But I can also say from many years in publishign as a magazine editor and a writer, my sense is that editors and agents really do want to discover new writers, that nothing beats that feeling. That doesn’t mean everything is read perfectly or that there is no advantage to trying to make social connections in the world of publishing. It can mean that when someone turns you down, they have a reason for doing so that isn’t just that they don’t know you or haven’t read the piece. A lot of teh successful writers I know are very persistent; it didn’t happen right away for them, but they kept writing.

I’ll start with agents, behind the paywall.

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It’s spring — the snow is finally melting, even here in Vermont — and I just had a conversation with a friend and literary critic about the class in college about a single American novelist that changed her life.

Which got me thinking: how many of us had an encounter — a single encounter, or close to it — that set us on the path we’re on? One book, one poem, one teacher, one afternoon? It sounds hokey to say it, but I suspect many of us had one.

I did. I was 17 when I read, for a senior year English seminar, Adrienne Rich’s “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” and I thought: this is what a poem can be? It can think on the page like an essay and then burst into precision like that, so lyrically? I remember feeling changed by it in the way you are when something rearranges your sense of what’s possible. It was the moment I began to want to write poetry.

Did you have such a moment? How old were you, and with whom? (It sounds like I’m asking about losing one’s virginity; I suppose it was an initiation of sorts.)

I’ve been thinking about that kind of initiation lately because my inbox has been full, of questions about demystifying hte publishing process — how to see past a door it can feel like you don’t know how to open, or to enter a world whose rules seem shrouded in semi-mystery (or are all too obvious, and yet you haven’t broken in yet). Every time I give a talk, people ask me the same (important) questions: How do I pitch an essay? What does a cover letter need to do? When is my work actually ready to send out? These are the questions I hear every year when I give lectures in writing programs, and they deserve some attempt to answer them, even if it is hard to say too much in generalities. Still, there is plenty to say. So: consider this my spring office hours.

What follows is the substance of advice I’ve given in programs at Yale, in workshops in Paris, and in my inbox over decades of editing, first at The Yale Review and before that at The New Yorker and The Paris Review distilled here as honestly as I can manage. Paid subscribers, read on—and post questions for Part 2, coming next week, in the comments! If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one to get more of the specific guidance I wish someone had handed me when I was starting out.

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I’ve touched before in this space on the visual artist Robert Irwin’s idea of being “available in response” to the work you are making. Today I want to take that idea further. In what ways is “play” essential to your work, and what you can do to play on the page in ways that move a project forward?

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I hope this finds you well and that you’re navigating these turbulent weeks with both grace and determination. It’s been one thing after another out there, and I know the feeling of being unsure whether to double down on one’s own work or give yourself over to the news—feeling, as citizens, a responsibility to it. For me, last week’s rabbit hole was the new tranche of Epstein files. But more on that another time. (I think I’ll be writing about Epstein and what the files show us soon.)

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For this week’s Craft Talk, I want to talk about a technique that interests me as both a poet and an essayist: the deliberate use of what’s left out, left unsaid, or left unexplained to create meaning; the white space between sections. We often talk about the fragment, but I like to focus on what is happening in what is not there rather than what is. Fragments, after all, work only because they are effectively making juxtapositions. I’ve talked in previous posts about distrusting certain kinds of fragmentary writing that feel like what they really want is more sustained thought and connection. But here, let’s build out some of the ideas I’ve touched on before about when writing built on gaps really shines: the moment when a writer places two things next to each other and trusts the reader to feel the charge between them. (By the way, this technique and post should be helpful even if you tend to write sustained, synthesized nonfiction or essays; everyone can benefit from understanding how image and restraint work.)

Much craft advice focuses on what to put in: how to build scenes, how to develop character, how to construct an argument. But some of the most powerful writing I know gets its force from what the writer chose not to say—if and when that not-saying can become legible on the page. Let’s look at how that happens.

A poem to start with

Consider Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” one of the most famous short poems in English and a poem that helped kickstart the literary movement known as Imagism, which still shapes contemporary English language poetry today. (Pound was, it must be said, both an influential poet and editor and and an anti-Semite; he was jailed by the United States for broadcasting pro-fascist, anti-semitic, treasonous content in Italy during World War II.) One of the things Imagism did was to move the idea of an “image” to the center of writing. When I ask my students what an image really is, they often struggle to say. It was Pound who came up with the best definition:

An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term “complex” rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application.

It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.

Imagism is in a sense the first step toward the dominance in our time of the contemporary image-based lyric as well as, in prose, the fragment and the lyric essay. It is the moment when English-language literature decided—or realized—that juxtaposing images could make a kind of argument, one without filler or pedantry. To understand how we got from Imagism to where we are today, you have to know that Imagism grew out of a distaste for—an exhaustion with—nineteenth-century poetry in meter. Lots of iambic pentameter, tetrameter, and whatnot. A few things happened at once: many of the advances in metered verse that could have been made had been made (see Milton, blank verse, etc). The late nineteenth century happened to be a time of many not-great poets. And the Victorians loved ornament, which crept into poetry too—so metrical verse started to seem padded out, decorative. Hence the famous Modernist anthology of bad verse, The Stuffed Owl, which makes for fun reading.

In response to lines like Alfred Austin’s “When with staid mothers’ milk and sunshine warmed, / The pasture’s frisky innocents bucked up,” Ezra Pound called for poets to “make it new.” By which he made: make it more direct; make it less told, more enacted. He issued a few directives about how to write a poem in a 1913 essay for the newly launched Poetry magazine called “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” (This is where you can find the above definition of an image, too.) In it he famously wrote, “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” He also articulated the ethos by which workshops still operate: “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.” And: “Go in fear of abstractions.” Pound took this to an extreme, noting, “Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.”

Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.

Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

But back to his famous poem “In a Station of the Metro,” which can be used as a kind of touchstone for the work of writing the gap. The poem was originally thirty-something lines. But Pound wanted to live by his own rules. He reread it and realized the whole poem could be found in just two lines:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

These two lines have no verb connecting them. No “like” or “as.” The faces are not compared to petals—they are simply placed beside them, separated by a colon and a line break.Think how different the poem would be if it said, “The apparition of these faces in the crowd / are like petals on a wet, black bough.” To add a simile would be to subordinate the image to the people moving through the underground station. At the time, Pound and other modernists wanted poetry to realize there was no such thing as non-poetic language or subjects. Apollinaire had been scorned for writing about the Eiffel Tower, which had itself been scorned as ugly. Artists wanted to move from the pastoral frisky innocents to crowds, urbanity, subway stations. Here, the poem makes the image of the petals as real within the poem as the faces themselves. (One note: The colon, which appeared in its original Poetry publication, does suggest a way to read the poem with the second line as subordinate to the first, but Pound changed that colon to a semi-colon upon book publication, making the relationship more subtle, more enacted.) The modernists wanted to say that words can make reality—do make reality—as much as they describe it. Perception and world are both given primacy. The gap is where the poem’s meaning lives. You, the reader, complete it. Indeed, as Pound wrote in A Don’ts:

When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

This is what I mean by the gap, or juxtaposition, as a source for making meaning. But the technique isn’t limited to poetry. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams, that other influential modernist, said. It is the engine behind some of the most exciting prose being written today, and can be a tool to use in your own drafts: More on that below the paywall.

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I was quiet because I was dealing with some health issues. Late last fall, I was diagnosed with a resurgence of babesia — one of the tick-borne infections I wrote about in The Invisible Kingdom — and in December I enrolled in a clinical trial for a new drug that aims to treat chronic babesiosis.

I’m so glad to be getting help and good care. But the first weeks of the trial were pretty tough: a cycle of appointments, herxes, recalibrations, and the temporal distortion that illness brings. Add to that the holidays, the parade of viruses the kids have ferried home, the massive snowstorm, and the ongoing, disorienting turmoil of the country — I wonder how you all are doing. Like so many of us, I find the abandonment of even the semblance of democratic principles and the murder of civilians in the streets just awful. Today and tomorrow there are a number of protests against ICE funding, in case you haven’t seen.

In brighter, and locally personal, news, a new poem of mine, “Changing Table,” appeared recently in The New Yorker, one of the first poems I’ve sent out in quite a while as I’ve been quietly finishing a manuscript. I hope you enjoy it. Another poem from the manuscript will be out in The New Yorker soon, and a long one is appearing in Poetry later this year I believe.

Tomorrow, too, I’ll be visiting the Conscious Writers Collaborative to talk about how to shape a nonfiction book — which feels, fittingly, like a conversation about beginnings and endings disguised as one about structure! If you’re a reader and you’re coming, do say hi.

Today, I want to return to a subject that obsesses me as both a writer and an editor: endings. In my Advanced Poetry class, my number one note to students is: “You’ve written past your ending!” I know I wrote about them recently, but here I want to talk more about what they are — and what kind of temporal and emotional work they do in a piece of writing, which is crucial to understand in order to be able to write better ones.

What is an ending? It’s a way of rereading the past and the future

On one of its broadest levels, art is a special way of making sense of our lives, and in particular of this strange fact: we are born in the middle, and we die in the middle. All kinds of experiences get cut off in the middle. Illness, love, political change, grief — it’s rare that in the moment these experiences come to us with clear narrative edges. They begin before we understand them and end, if they end at all, in ways that resist the tidy arc of resolution. Much of what we live never “finishes.” It simply changes state. And sometimes we never have that final conversation with an ex or a parent that we thought we would someday have.

Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, argues that the endings we create in art are not mere stopping points. They are temporal fictions that allow us to experience our lives as if they had shape. They are retrospective — they cast meaning backward over the middle — and they are prospective — they imply a future the reader must imagine beyond the final line.

As Kermode writes, we need these “fictions” of beginning and end not because they are literally true, but because they make it possible to live in time at all without losing one’s mind. They create what he calls a consonance between origin, middle, and imagined completion. They humanize what would otherwise be the intolerable fact of temporal chaos. In doing so, they make art into art, as distinct from chaotic narratives of witness.

Of course, while an appetite for art may be universal across time, but the specific conventions of literature change over the decades, and so does how we think about our endings. In our postmodern, “end-of-times” era, endings feel especially charged and hard to deliver: How do you “resolve” what often feels unresolved, or, indeed, unresolvable? To end something in a way that gives it too much shape or tidiness can feel as false and disappointing to readers as not giving any shape at all to a text.

Leo Bersani, glossing Kermode in his New York Times review of The Sense of an Ending, puts it in a way I admire: modern literature finds a new way to think about crisis. The end becomes not imminent — a clear arrival — but immanent: felt as pressure within the present. We live in what feels like perpetual crisis, yet “crisis,” Kermode reminds us, is not inherent in a moment; it is a way of thinking about a moment. That distinction feels newly urgent to me this year.

Genre as shape rather than a set of rules

One of the most freeing ideas I offer my students is this: genre is less a set of rules to follow than a kind of shape that suits a kind of experience or story.

A sonnet, a novel, a memoir — each is a historically evolved way of imposing pattern (a kind of shape) on experience. What matters is not obedience to convention but the patterning itself. And no pattern exists without pressure against it, without constraint. Tradition gives us a recognizable shape, and history selects for some of the most exciting shapes.

Making a pattern out of experience is its own pleasure; further playing with the pattern or intervening in the tradition that pattern belongs to can be even more pleasurable. For example, read Harryette Mullen’s “Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia” or Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition.” In each, variation registers as meaningful.

Originality, in other words, doesn’t come from escaping form. It comes from working within a pattern deeply enough that your deviations carry force.

What an ending actually does

So what is thew news you can use, as a writer? Here are some closer looks at what an ending does.

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As the year closes, I’ve been thinking about endings as anticipatory structures—the places toward which we work, often without realizing it. The end of a year is supposed to feel resolved, but it usually doesn’t; we’re always in the middle of something. Which may be why many writers feel so at home in endings: they offer a vantage point, however fleeting.

There are writers who live for beginnings and writers who live for endings. I don’t mean this in the tidy personality-typing way that social media loves. I mean that some of us feel most engaged—most drawn, almost bodily—toward certain parts of the creative process. Some writers I know thrill at the blank page and its glut of possibility; they love the feeling of conjuring a book’s opening, when everything is still possible. Others—myself among them—are most invigorated when the shape of the thing has finally begun to reveal itself, when we can sense the gravitational pull of the last page and orchestrate (or discover?) the movement that will bring it to fruition. For me, it’s an almost architectural feeling: a kind of internal click, when I know with utter clarity what the ending is.

I’ve always liked ending things (I even take pleasure when my kids’ lunch prep lets me use the last bit in a jar of peanut butter or a bag of oats—there is so much strange satisfaction in completion). Writing poetry, for me, the ending tends to arrive early on, long before I’ve understood the middle. Which is to say: I allow the poem to unfold messily, to surprise me, to make discoveries. My early drafts often contain a lot of throat-clearing or wind-up, baggy middles, all of which I later have to cut. But then, somewhere in the composition, a line appears, snapping into place. It’s the first thing to be done, that ending.

(I do have to watch out for this, though: sometimes the “snap” becomes a tic. In my first book of poems, I realized during copyedits that many of the poems ended with an imperative. I had to rework some of them.)

In prose, I often realize the ending while I’m doing something meditative, or in transit—but still lost in the weeds of a middle chapter. Usually I’m feeling a bit of despair about the book, when I take a trip or go for a run, and the ending announces itself, like a beacon to write toward.

I wrote the ending of The Long Goodbye on a run, still in the middle of drafting the book. I wrote the ending of The Invisible Kingdom in a café in Fort Greene I loved, at a time when I felt mired in the book’s middle and suspected I’d never find my way out. And the new book: I wrote its ending on a plane from England thirteen months ago; the beginning revealed itself soon after; the middle is where I’ve been working ever since. This is my pattern. I think of it as a small gift from my creative daemon—a reminder to persist through the challenging middle, which always makes me want to give up.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s this: don’t be afraid to skip ahead or to work in your own idiosyncratic way. Don’t be afraid to turn toward the parts of a book you’re drawn to, even if they arrive “out of order.” Narrative rarely arrives chronologically, and neither does insight.

This, too, is a way of thinking about endings as a writer’s form of hope. An ending is a place the self is trying to reach before it knows how. And sometimes we go beyond the ending, trying to lard in a little too much, anxious about what the reader will “get.” I sent poems to The New Yorker a while back and, in a moment of anxiety, added two lines to one poem’s ending. The editor took the poem but said, “I think it ends earlier, here.” The funny thing was that he wanted it to end one line after my original ending—and one line before the revised one. (He was completely right.) The revision helped, but I overdid it by half a turn.

I find I always return, at year’s end, to certain endings in literature—those that gather the whole arc of a piece and turn it, with quick torque, into something more capacious, unexpected, unforgettable. Think of Joan Didion’s endings in The White Album or “Goodbye to All That”: the clipped, almost anti-epiphanic gesture; the way she unsettles rather than resolves. Or James Baldwin, and the endings of Notes of a Native Son or “Stranger in the Village,” where moral seriousness and emotional restraint are held simultaneously.

Perhaps thinking about what your ending might do for the book—rather than what it literally will be—will give you something to write toward. Below, I look more closely at two endings and how they work, to see how they might help us write our own. Plus, as ever, a prompt!

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Hi! Happy almost Thanksgiving. First, I’ll do another Office Hours post for paid subscribers. Send me your questions in the comments here, or DM me! This is your chance to ask anything that’s on your mind about writing. And today, a mini Office Hours: Last week, a reader wrote to ask how I handle working on multiple projects at once, and I’ve been thinking about the question because the slightly strange truth is that I almost always am—whether I like it or not. I think of this as keeping afloat in time’s onrush by playing around with it….

RIght now I’m writing long poems and a short memoir. And there are the essays and criticism I take on because they feel part of my public life (pieces for the Times, the Atlantic, various magazines), and then there are the books, the long-form explorations that require immersion, continuity, and an interior quiet I don’t always have in my day to day life or duing my semester teaching.

And now, of course, there are my children—at 7 and 9, they are another kind of project, though calling them that feels insufficient to the reality of two full people whose needs and imaginations shape the texture of my days. I spend so much time with them in ways no calendar captures. I don’t want to count or measure that time, and yet it inevitably rearranges the rest of my time, and can, at times, leave me feeling frustrated that I haven’t had access to the leisure of a deeper kind of writing. Which is why I completely changed my writing process and time management this fall…with good results.

Below the fold, a bit about how and why it can be good to take breaks on projects with other projects, and a prompt for working with your own divided attention.

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Some fun news: stay turned for two new poems coming out in The New Yorker in the coming months! And on to today’s post: This fall, I’ve been writing: not just trying to write. A lot, or just a little; the amount doesn’t matter. What does is the fact of stringing together a somewhat consistent set of dates where something in you has clicked open and you find yourself inside the early weather of a book or a new piece you’re excited about. And being in that state has left me thinking hard about how we protect depth, and what it takes—psychologically, practically, structurally—to create the portal back into our most interior work.

Paid subscribers can read on for the craft notes: the difference between “claims” and restoration, a mandate to help you find time to wwork, and a guided exercise for building your own conditions for depth. (If you’re not a paying subscriber, I’d love to have you join me.)

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Illness enforces a strange kind of attention. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been thinking once more about gaps and fragments—the literal gaps on the page, and how much contemporary writing leans on them for meaning. Once, white space between sections was a form of punctuation: a way of noting the completion of a long sustained thought, and a way to take up a new section of engagement. In narrative writing, it allows for both a pause and a pivot. (White space in poems in very complicated, but it can be a pause, a pivot, a rupture, a way of making langauge’s materiality felt by the reader.)

Increasingly, in narrative writing, it’s become the structure itself, a structure that organizes (or, as the case may be, doesn’t quite organize) an essay or novel. Lots of writers now use white space to solve logical problems—to replace transitions, to imply relation where we haven’t quite earned it, to gesture toward profundity rather than build it. I’ve done it in my own first draft of my prose book! But there are problems with this approach…

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It’s been a dark week. The news is full of violence, paranoia, and conversations that seem to circumvent the deepest issues facing us, instead of identifying the questions that most matter. In such moments, it can feel odd to come here to talk about the ins and outs of writing. And yet: the work of writing is also the work of time, time that we live in, amidst all else. To keep writing is to insist on carving out a human temporality inside a culture that accelerates and distorts our sense of hours, days, years. So, in these moments, I find it helpful to tuck back into the work I know how to do.

Today, I am marking a milestone and thinking about how we make (and fail to make) time for the work we love. I have a prompt for you about finding time, and a concrete suggestions: identify what “type” of writer you are. This week, your prompt is to ask what kind of writer are you: the dutiful planner, the playful experimenter, the last-minute sprinter? Each requires a different way of making time. Below, I share how I think about it, and how my own daily practice has shifted this September, as a working mom for whom a big time-suck (and real focus) right now is getting my kids acclimated to school and set up to feel good about this fall’s work.

First, the milestone! I’ve just finished editing and writing the introduction to The Story of the Body: Poems of Illness and Recovery, a poetry anthology that W.W. Norton will publish next fall. It’s a book I longed for when I was really sick myself; too sick to read long novels or nonfiction. I felt very alone and wanted to read as a way of shadowing other minds who’d been in places like the one I was, wondering about their future, navigating pain. I wanted all the brilliant poems of illness, gathered together in one place.

This project was, unexpectedly, joyful to complete. I read across centuries—William Dunbar lamenting in the fifteenth century that his pounding headache kept him from writing, Emily Dickinson’s elliptical evocations of pain, contemporary poets charting recovery, acceptance, or their confrontations with an increasingly bureaucratized biomedical system. Illness gives us a different experience of time: a perpetual present, a changed horizon, reminding us how uncertain life really is. Reading across eras, I felt comfort in the continuity—an intimation that the lived time of illness, though isolating, was also a shared time, and that I was not alone in searching for some kind of meaning to try to harvest from my experience of getting sick.

Closer to home, time is chaotic in a different way. The back-to-school weeks are always a whirlwind: soccer games, birthday parties, apple picking, playdates that leave us all, at times, more depleted than invigorated. At the end of one such weekend, my sons asked if we could please do less next weekend. Their request was so sweet—and englightening. It reminded me that what they (we) crave most is not more experiences, but more time to play. Or rather, more unstructured inhabitation of time: hours of separate fidelities, when each of us can be absorbed in our own pursuits, together in solitude, or together, playing.

My kids love to play. They do very few extracurriculars compared to their friends, because I’m never as organized as I want to be, but also because I want them to have that sense of having to invent games and entertainment for themselves that comes with unstructured time. Some part of me suspects that this is the key to finding out what you love to do, how your mind works, and how to self-regulate as an adult. Maybe they’ll get into a less fancy college—but maybe, too, they’ll have some understanding of their own modes of pleasure and boredom. Who knows! And I guess that’s the point: how much energy we spend trying to anticipate when instead mabye we need to just follow our own deepest internal fidelities.

As I was thinking about the boys, it occurred to me that this is what I want to talk about this week: not a craft issue, but the crucial work of making time, and how you make it depending on what kind of writer you are. Ahead, some ideas..

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I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs and literary (vs more journalistic) personal essays lately, and thinking about where both stand as genres.

When I teach or edit personal essays, I often find myself returning to a basic but easily blurred distinction: memoir and the personal essay are not the same thing. Memoir can be long or short; it may be primarily concerned with memory and recounting, with giving shape to a life or a stretch of it, with creating a character—yourself—who changes over time. A memoir can rest, for long passages, in narrative or description. A personal essay, though, requires something else: not only a series of well-told scenes or memories but also what I tell my students is a kind of thought arc. Some kind of argument is being made—explicitly or implicitly—about how to live, what to notice, what to question. In a lyric essay, this is made through associative juxtaposition. In a critical essay, through building out a careful argumentative through-line with lots of critical signposting. In a personal essay, lyric or not, hybrid-critical or not, that happens through the coalescing of a kind of preoccupation across time, and the emotional or intellectual development—and ultimate transformation—of an understanding.

That argument does not have to look like a thesis statement, nor should it: essays are essays, not five-paragraph reports, and often the argument or insight emerges from the writer’s syntactical characterization of their own obsessions or vulnerability. Then, too, argument emerges as an unfolding inquiry, a pattern of return and reframing, a series of insights that accrue meaning by being placed in relation to one another. (See John Berger, Margo Jefferson, Annie Dillard, Cathy Park Hong in Minor Feelings, Joan Didion, Jia Tolentino, Maggie Nelson, and so many more.)

But the presence of thought, of the essayist thinking on the page, is what distinguishes the personal essay from a memoiristic vignette. It is also what makes structure so crucial if what you’re trying to produce is what we call literary nonfiction, where something about the way of saying is as important as what is said. (I might distinguish this from journalistic nonfiction, which can be literary, but isn’t always: sometimes it is more about the what is said than the how, the way of saying and seeing.) In memoir, a story or character arc often carries you forward on the strength of plot alone, but the personal essay depends on the shape of its thinking to generate propulsion. And, interestingly, literary memoirs are looking more and more like essays: more and more, they carve out a narrow area of focus to plumb and investigate, rather than reflecting on a writer’s entire life. Here are some key things to keep in mind as you write and revise, and especially if you’re having trouble editing your own work.

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I confess that always slightly dread these questions—because they deserve long, specific answers of the kind that can’t be delivered in breezy generalities. But here’s what I wish more writers understood: editors are not looking for “good work” in some general sense. They are looking for work that adds to their magazine’s particular project. That project is usually invisible to writers but is obvious once you study a magazine closely.

A magazine, after all, is not an anthology. An anthology exists to gather together the best or most representative work in a category. A magazine, by contrast, expresses an editorial identity—a sensibility, a set of commitments, an evolving conversation. That is why, when magazines say “This isn’t right for us,” they don’t simply mean “no, thank you” politely; they mean, “it doesn’t belong to the particular conversation or identity our magazine is shaping through curation and commissioning.”

Understanding that identity is as important as sending in good writing. The most common mistake I see from early-career writers is treating all magazines as interchangeable receptacles for “literary work.” In fact, each one is distinct. The editor Norman Podhoretz noted, correctly, that a magazine is shaped entirely by an editor’s sensibility in all its particularity. To be a good editor in chief, you have to say no to things that are good but don’t quite further that magazine’s idea of itself. Understanding that distinctness—the rubrics of a magazine, the sensibility it is expressing—is a key to making your submission or pitch land.

This is why I always know when someone hasn’t read The Yale Review. The pitch or submission feels earnest but mismatched—an op-ed style essay pitched to a magazine that publishes literary essays. Other editors talk about seeing a more commercial short story pitched to a place that publishes experimental fiction only. Or the personal essay is aimed at a sub-genre of readers (say, mothers) to whom a magazine doesn’t specifically cater.

So: as magazines open up their reading periods now and in the coming months, if you’re planning to submit, I suggest you read three recent issues (or a mix of online pieces). Observe not just the quality of the work, but its function: What conversations is it extending? What kinds of risks does it reward? Ask: What belongs here that could not belong elsewhere? What rubrics does the magazine use? What genres do they not publish?

That question will serve you better than any checklist. Again, it is also why magazines so often say, “not right for us.” They aren’t (only) evaluating your talent; they’re protecting the coherence of their own project.

Here, I’ll share some a grab-bag of specific advice on cover letters, submissions vs. pitches, and a taxonomy of genres—behind the paywall. This is all as it applies to magazines, not agents or book publishers, though I can address some of those questions in another post.

If you’ve found this useful so far, consider subscribing or supporting my work—it helps me keep writing these pieces for writers at all stages of their careers.

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Thanks for all your questions for this installation of Office Hours! I was heartened by how many of you asked about editing, revision, and structure—unglamorous but essential parts of writing. Anyone who’s taken a workshop with me knows that I believe learning how structure works—especially reading closely for structure in its more intuitive forms—is the key to becoming a better and more successful writer.

I haven’t tackled everyone’s question yet. I’ll do another post soon on all these questions as they apply to poetry, as well as one on submitting pitches and pieces, organizing writing time, research for a trade book, and much more. But here is a start: some thoughts on how I think through these issues in my own projects and as a magazine editor. (The deeper dive—complete with index cards, Nancy Drew, and the messy middle—is for paying subscribers. Writing these posts takes time away from my own writing, so thank you for supporting them.)

Where do you start building a piece or a book?

Early in a project, I generate material and read widely around it, jotting notes by hand and on my phone. I’m listening for the question I’m really asking, or for a crisper formulation of what interests me—what I want to try to say whether explicitly (in essays and criticism), or more metaphorically (in poems or lyric essays).

As scenes and beats emerge, I start thinking about structure. For a book-length project, I sketch an outline in Google Docs and break out my favorite organizational tool: colored index cards. Each color has a function: yellow might be the present-day thread; green, an alternate narrative line; blue, the research points I don’t want to neglect; orange, the hard-won formulations or metaphors that feel like keystones. Spreading them across my office floor lets me see the whole.

In a first draft, I’m focused simply on generating, taking risks, and having some fun—if I’m not interested in what I’m writing, no one else will be.

When I have a draft of some kind, I work on structure: pacing, tone, transitions. Years ago, while writing New Yorker piece about Nancy Drew’s inventor, Edward Stratemeyer, I learned that he instructed his ghostwriters to end every chapter with an exclamation point or a question mark. That simple trick trained young readers to keep turning the pages. Since then, I’ve thought about suspense and propulsion as key elements of even literary nonfiction. While writing The Invisible Kingdom, I ended each section with a realization or question to propel the reader into the next. Detective fiction, funnily enough, helped me structure a book about chronic illness, where I was concerned that readers might flag during long sections of research.

Next are more specific some answers to your questions — things that I think every writer should understand about revision and self-editing. Your support allows me to write these posts—thank you.

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Are there topics you wish I’d dive into? Or things like navigating freelance finances, applying for teaching / editing jobs?

If you have time and enjoy my posts, I would value your input on what you’d like to see more of here—whether deep‑dive cultural essays, annotated drafts, live craft discussions, interviews, resources, behind‑the‑scenes glimpses on editing and magazines, or something else entirely. Weekly reading / residency / life recommendations? Here are some things I’ve been hoping to do more of: close readings; posts on structure (chapters, etc); navigating the seemingly endless middle of writing an essay or memoir or piece of prose; and more.

Feel free to reply directly to this post or drop a note in the comments. Paid subscribers will get first dibs on the Q&A, but I welcome all questions (and you all have asked really excellent ones so far).

Thanks, as always, for reading…

Warmly,
Meghan

Many of us imagine writing as deriving either from a bolt of inspiration or a consistent application of iron discipline. I don’t know about you, but any time I hear about someone writing a book in a three-week sprint (I’m looking at you, Jack Kerouac; more recently, I believe the French writer Colombe Shneck wrote one section of Swimming in Paris in a few short weeks or months) I feel overcome. Why doesn’t that happen to me? I wonder. Why am I so slow? At the other end of the spectrum, we romanticize writers like Anthony Trollope—who wrote a set number of words a day—or Philip Roth, who was famously routine in his writing. In MFA programs, many of us teach the importance of consistency. But most of what I’ve written that matters—books, essays, poems—has emerged not from flashes of genius or perfect consistency but from uneven repetition, a kind of patient (but not punitive) accountability with myself, and the gentle pressure of rituals that are inevitably disrupted by illness, family crisis, or child-rearing—and, crucially, which help me to rebound from those interruptions.

Some of this has to do with where I focus my energy. I tend to be perfectionistic, and it’s easy for me to focus only on what is not working. As time passes, and the books get written, though, I’ve come to see that creating a life that invites your writing to return to central stage *even when your attention strays* is itself the key task. What environments allow you to keep coming back to writing even when time and energy are fractured? For you, that environment might be physical (a desk you enjoy returning to; a sunny room that feels like a retreat), social (a group that expects your pages), or temporal (an hour each morning when the house is quiet, or that you look forward to returning to after camping with your family for ten days). But it is almost always built, not found—and, crucially, part of what we have to create is a tolerance for our own lapses. We have to focus on the small happenings unfurling all the time…and make room for them.

This summer, for me, the usual scaffolding is under stress now that I’m back from Paris. The momentum I had got interrupted by a three‑day migraine, jet lag, and an overdue colonoscopy. (My mother died at 55 from colon cancer and I swore to her I’d be good about getting screened. You should too!) The kids are home. Camps change weekly. There are birthdays and trips to Legoland to plan. Some days I sit down to write only to realize it’s already time to pack snacks and head to the pool…

So let’s talk about concrete practices to allow for consistent overcoming of inconsistency, which I think is an often overlooked aspect of a writing life. Here are the three key elements I rely on, followed by a checklist that I find helpful, and hope you will too.

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