A Writer’s Toolbox

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Could a single modern usage book revolutionize my home writing space and daily writing practice?
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How Not to Be an Italian Mother

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I did another thing Italian mothers frowned upon: I left an eight-month-old baby for two weeks and flew to the other side of the world to work. This meant sleeping in a mice-infested cabin in a commune in the woods with no cell reception or wireless, partaking in dance therapy classes, getting naked, and letting a total stranger embrace me during a scream-themed energy healing session where I was encouraged to get in touch with my primordial feelings towards my mother.
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This Is Not a Defense of the Power of Art

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There are only three times I remember out and out weeping in response to a book or a movie. I’m not talking about welling up. I put the books in question down and buried my head or stopped the movie so I could go hide in the bathroom. I was knocked off my tracks, interrupted, more than moved.
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Why I Read True Crime

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The second you tell someone you’ve just read a mind-blowing book about Jeffrey Dahmer that they simply must read, they start to back away from you. The first rule of reading true crime, evidently, is that you don’t talk about reading true crime.
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Mutually Assured Destruction: Reading and Writing About Nuclear War

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My head might be full of kilotons, of radiation burns, of calculations about radius and wind speed, but at least I don’t have choices to make about any of this. Whether we survive this has nothing to do with me.
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Slaying Monsters in Fiction

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When a monstrous beast appears in a story, then it becomes, at least in part, what that story is about. 
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Why I Write Postcards

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Even though the postcards and letters I receive and send say the same thing an email or text could, the physicality of the mail—the dirt on the postcard, the stamp from the post office, the waterlogged letter, the delay between correspondences—carries with it something that the digital simply can’t.
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On Home and Elsewhere

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You can stay at home or feel at home, and often those two notions coincide. But what about when they don’t? When home as a location and state of being begin to diverge, I think the culprit is temporal rather than topographical.
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Reading Resistance in Translation

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I found solidarity in understanding that across time and culture and language, those who are marginalized and repressed continue to resist.
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Ian Nairn and the Art of Seeing a City

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Nairn’s refusal to dice up and single out polished parts of the battered whole leads to a vision of urban space that is democratic, fluid, and accommodating to anyone willing to slow down and observe.
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On Refuge

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Those enclosed in reservations and walled compounds and private estates are not perhaps always as privileged as they think they are.
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An Evening of Immersive Theater with the Dead and Dying

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My experience of The Dead, 1904, Paul Muldoon and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s immersive theater adaptation of James Joyce’s short story, was unremarkable until an audience member fainted.
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Regarding the Em Dash

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The em dash is the doppelgänger of the punctuation world, a talented mimic impersonating other punctuation, but not exactly, leaving space to shade meaning.
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Three Odysseys

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Odysseys come in all shapes and forms, from epic to personal.
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When I Was a Girl I Wrapped Books

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We wrapped shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing two tape dispensers and four commercial-size rolls of wrapping paper mounted just above our heads.
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The Damascus Journals

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It's important that the memory of a place survives the horror that overcomes it. So I find my Syrian voice in the sweet memories of a grand city.
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The Nothing Time: Writing and Reading Through Injury

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It’s strange, as a writer, disorienting, to have memories, no matter how brief, unavailable to me. Did I slip? Stumble? Push myself off the rocks? Twist? Flail? Leap? Scream? Cry out?
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A Literary Tourist’s Fruitless Search for the Canadian Dissident Novel

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What you are looking for is something edgy.  Something from the counterculture.  About someone blocking a pipeline through unceded territory, maybe.  From anyone who writes in opposition to power, or writes about people who take chances. 
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