A Room of One's Own and Time to Think

This posting from Literary Ladies is about Virginia Woolf, but I find myself thinking about Tillie Olsen. I think they were from the same era–perhaps Olsen was a little younger. But of very different economic classes. I don’t think that Woolf was saying...

Dirty secrets are the truest secrets. 

A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it | Life and style | The Guardian There is nothing more sustaining to long-term creative work than time and space – and these things cost money Source: A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can...

Advice worth repeating from Octavia Butler

I just wish this article weren’t riddled with typos. Nonetheless, it’s well worth reading if you can overlook them. I listened to Kindred recently (per her advice, I listen to recorded books during my almost daily walks) and found it really compelling....

Elements of Surprise

I heard about Vera Tobin’s book Elements of Surprise on the Hidden Brain podcast. Shankar Vedantam was interviewing Tobin about her work analyzing the ways in which knowing/not knowing affects the unfolding of narrative and how writers/filmmakers plant seeds to...