The loss of a journal
How many notebooks, journals or letters have been swept away by circumstance, carrying the minutiae of memory with them? Leigh...
Stories as generosity
An expansive view of stories from Turkestan, as if they embody the sweeping spaces of the steppe, and the freedom...
Key Penmanship Indicators (KPIs) – III
I like this aesthetic amalgam proposed by Harold Bloom – another high-held yardstick by which to measure quality of writing.
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On life and writing: the fast and the slow of it
I was charmed by Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, wishing I could reverse time's arrow to accompany her on a walk to...
On writing letters
The wryness of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days is captured here in describing the cultural activity of choice for his younger...
Portrait of a writer
Iris Origo (1902-88) was an English writer who grew up in Italy and married an Italian. Together they bought and...
Pencil and paper
Steinbeck wrote with pencil on the ubiquitous American yellow pad. Computers and word-processing came too late for him, and so...
The sonnet never written
This is one of the longest and most entertaining chapters in Machado de Assis' novel Don Casmurro, a fictional memoir...
The generous and beautiful word…
Adam Nicholson writes of a scroll Homer found rolled beneath the head of a female mummy: Hawara Homer, written on...
My kind of typewriter
This extraordinary piece of engineering allowing a polyglot to spin between four languages and keyboards. Manual typewriters, mind, not bits...
Letters unopened
We use the term ‘back of the envelope’ to capture the notion of jotting down an idea or plan on...
A poet’s prayer
In fact, a prayer for any writer. Having just read John Drury's marvelous appreciation of George Herbert's life and his...
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