They acknowledge that the realities closest to us - the rhythms of our lives, the people we love most - are shaped by forces beyond the edges of our sight.
Loneliness seeks out metaphors not just for definition but for the companionship of resonance, the promise of kinship in comparison.
There's something about that puritanical narrative of progress and upward mobility and work ethic that the glorification of abstinence fits pretty neatly into. That pairs with the fact that 12-step recovery has had too large a monopoly on how treatment is understood in America.
12-step recovery is very focused on abstinence, and that's bled into the broader understanding of treatment. It would be most useful to have multiple senses of what treatment could look like.
I completely identify with finding freedom in boundaries. That's why I tend to have more freedom when I write nonfiction over fiction: because I'm running up against actuality and beholden to the truth in a different way.
'Tough' is one of the last adjectives I would use to describe myself.
Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.
Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
Probably every person is some mixture of wanting to feel a sense of commonality and shared experience with others but also wanting to feel completely singular and unique.
I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them.
Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.
Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege.
You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh.
The 'here' of Watts is pastel houses with window gratings in curly patterns. 'Here' is yard sales with bins full of stuffed animals and used water guns. Here is Crips turf.
The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.
