Music
Since the news of Dolly Parton’s passing on Tuesday, the world’s rhinestones are all shining a little less brightly. Reading the obituaries in the hours since her passing, it is hard not to notice how similar they are. This is, in part, a testament to how meticulously Dolly honed a persona of positivity over a »
Poetry
These poems are taken from The Saltwater Letters, my forthcoming volume chiefly made up of poem-letters to friends, family, and fellow writers. This book-to-be began a number of years ago with a letter to the late Lucille Clifton, then several others coming in quick succession. Then, as I indicate in “Lost Letter to Yusef Komunyakaa,” »
Art
Writing about myself, what I do on a certain day, who I meet, ideas I might have, my views on current events or the cultural moment in which we find ourselves; or notes on books I’m reading, frustrations I may or may not have with my career, hopes, dreams, regrets, plans; even the world of »
Essay
“Murray’s journey of racial and gender self-definition through mobility, travel, and transmasculine jouissance was intrinsic to their creativity and self-expression.” Pauli Murray (1910–1985) was an African American gender-nonconforming feminist, civil rights activist, legal scholar, and teacher, and, later in life, an Episcopalian priest. Raised largely in Durham, North Carolina, by their maternal aunts, Murray was »
Interview
“Art is an artifact, you know? Once you assume that every single language in literature is a created language, is an artificial language, you feel free to just include whatever is there around you.” Translation is a double form of correspondence between me and Lisa. First, there is the near-daily—or, sometimes, multiple-times-a-day—correspondence we’ve maintained during »
Art
“I never feel so smart as I do when I’m drawing, because I have complete control and I can subvert all else that I’ve just made possible.” A “sketch diary” drawing pad Allan Gurganus bought at the Stanford University Art Center, while on a Stegner Fellowship, displays the name “The Globetrotter” and is personally marked »
Essay
“‘Darling, when I share my loneliness with you I cut it in half.’” If she is known for nothing else, Carson McCullers is known for being southern. The Georgia-born New York transplant set her fiction almost exclusively in small, stagnant towns in the Deep South. Despite her personal ambivalence toward the region, she needed to »
Interview
“Moving through the world as a writer is, I think, an experience of moving through the world with your eyes open to observe. Charlie Lovett: The Correspondent is your debut novel, [but] it was not your first attempt at writing a novel. Can you tell us just a little bit about the road that your »
Photo Essay
“The Welty House speaks to the author’s love of travel, art, music, and the centrality of family to her life. But it is, above all, a home designed for work, which, in Welty’s case, meant reading and writing.” Twenty-five years after the author’s death, Eudora Welty’s home phone number remains the same as it ever »
Essay
“Often what is hidden in Mitchell’s portraits of New York is a reflection of his life in North Carolina.” One November day some years ago, at the midpoint of my obsession with legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, I drove two hours south from Durham, North Carolina, where I was living at the time, to »
Fiction
“That’s always been part of the mission of my work—to write about the sheer breadth and wonder and scope of our southern lives.” Leoneda Inge: I understand that this book came at a critical time for you, health-wise. Was writing this novel a healing experience for you? Tayari Jones: I feel like this novel really »
“We see how the literary tradition of southern letter writing is fundamentally relational, notsolitary; that writers work and are inspired by somewhere specific.” As this is the Arts & Letters issue, it seemed only appropriate to write a letter to you from the historic Love House, where I work and where the Center for the »