I reviewed Katie Coyle's story "Fear Itself" (published in One Story) for Ploughshares this week. I love Coyle's story. As I read it the first time, sitting out on our balcony on my day off (a half-eaten donut on the table in front of me, next to a cup of bodega coffee), I felt like a person again, which is what I feel like fiction ultimately does when it's doing its job. Her female characters are people. They aren't teenage-girl cliches. And they not vapid, sexualized objects, which, jesus christ, can't we get some more fiction featuring young women without descriptions of their breasts? The bar is set so low here. But regardless of my, uh, fatigue, Coyle's story is great. I drew hearts all over the margins because there was so much shit to love. The narrator's observations were sharp and accurate. You should read it. 

I'm also really glad I renewed my subscription to One Story at AWP this year. I subscribed for a year or two in college, but was too miserable to keep up and I stopped reading. So, excited to be back. And I'm into getting shit in the mail that isn't a.) a pre-approved credit card offer or b.) a bank statement. Bank statements are 0 fun. 

To be real though, the literary journals I have in my apartment are soon going to overwhelm the free surfaces in my bedroom – You can only artfully stack so many of these things.

"The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it."

Reread Patricia Lockwood's poem over on The Awl today. Guts me every time. 

I love this. All of these. 

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
       love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

"Often I'm writing in response to books I've read, fairy tales, ghost stories, other writers' short stories. A big part of writing "Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water" was going to see Species II. There's something about really a pulpy story—Species II is not a good movie—but maybe there's something about the underlying metaphor, women as alien, women as monster, that is always going to make me want to write a story. "

– Kelly Link

I kept reading this interview and kept finding shit to love:

"Look, think about how gossip works. What are the best stories? When you're telling stories, you're telling stories about people who have made a really poor choice, who do or say the kind of thing we all know you shouldn't. In fiction, at least, there's a kind of cathartic, discomfiting joy—a pain/pleasure—in people behaving badly."

"We get the work done on the ground level. And the kindest thing I can do for you is to tell you to get your ass on the floor. I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some ways inept. This is true of every writer, and it’s especially true of writers who are 26. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you."

Write Like a Motherfucker
by Cheryl Strayed