Essays

The archivist and writer’s recently translated triptych fuses autofiction, essay, and criticism to study the complex lives of three female artists in the public eye.

A memoir that challenges stereotypes, celebrates dance, and reflects on loss.

I am in the shower washing off the day’s yard work. Mid-scrub I realize I missed a Black Lives Matter Cleveland rally in support of defunding the police. Relief pours over me.

On disasters, the “perverse incentives” of social media, and writing in catastrophic times.

On the relationship between poetry and social struggle.

In a career spanning over two decades, Wayne Koestenbaum has copped to a lot.

The writer on her new book Brown Album, personal essays, camp as armor, the hyperreal, and designing her own Barbie.

On writing to include others, artists who generate hope, and how constriction can be inventive.

The condition of most of our lives is that of continuous flight, in some manner or form—flight from faulty logic, from place of birth to the place we alight, from situations that no longer serve us, from political precarity—flight, as in rupture.

Stagg’s essays, stories, and profiles on art and fashion speak to the new spaces and meanings created by the Internet.

My mother sits on a coral reef, her gray hair undulating around her head, face blank, her eyes like a fish’s…

The writer on his new book of essays and the state of limbo as a necessary state of artistic life.

The essayist on writing about birds to bridge thematic leaps from fathers to tattoos to cross-continental moves.

Sixty years of writing about language.

The writer on Swedish Nebraska, the lyric essay, and brevity as a superpower. 

The writer discusses what Laika, the first Soviet space dog, can teach us about companionship and loneliness. 

The writer on surviving assault, deepening our standards for justice, and resisting forgiveness as the only way to move through pain.

The writer on the space between poetry and prose, how fighting is like dancing, and the resonant symbolism of the idiophone.

With Nigella Sativa, we arrive at midnight together, to the intimacy that can come from mass hysteria.