I’d be hard-pressed to name another undertaking that brings you into quite such intimate contact with your own limitations.

I’d be hard-pressed to name another undertaking that brings you into quite such intimate contact with your own limitations. Still, there are days when you feel potent and powerful. There are days when you can barely keep up with your own words and, better yet, as they tumble out they strike you as both precise and eccentric, words only you could write. You feel gifted. You can feel, on the best days, that the language is coming through you as much as it is coming from you; that it’s emanating from your unconscious or from the atmosphere itself, or that you seem to have positioned yourself, that day, directly over the patch of floor where geysers of pure inspiration erupt unpredictably, with nothing under your chair but wood or linoleum or carpeting. You get those occasional flights, those experiences of yourself as a magical child, and it doesn’t matter if you’re writing about twelve dancing princesses or about cities crushed into rubble. It’s nothing as simple as stumbling into beauty. The magic is short-lived. On many days, writing is much like most other jobs. You arrive. You do your duty, until it’s time to leave for the day. What you’ve produced strikes you as neither bad nor good. You’ve filled X number of pages with X number of words. You go on. You go on because you never know when transfiguration, the swoop and the soar, might decide you’re due, and take you for another spin.

— Michael Cunningham, Unsayable: A Life in Writing (Random House, July 21, 2026)

— Allison Stranger, from "AI Makes Me a Better Writer" (wsj.com, August 17, 2026)

It was in that moment ...that I decided that I would never take shit from anyone ever again.

‘It was in that moment ...that I decided that I would never take shit from anyone ever again.’ ... It occurred to me that Eric was telling me his origin story. He apparently adhered to the notion that there was such a thing; that a human life could be discerned in dialogue with a single event and laid out in a neat line. He felt as if he had identified his point of reference – the key that would unlock a treasure trove of meaning and resolution. I did not. There was no such order; no narrative arc. History was chaos, top to bottom, back to front, and a human life was no different. Any attempt to decipher a lucid course would always be thwarted by the thrust of happenstance.

— Fiona Mozley, Awake Awake: A Novel (Algonquin Books, August 4, 2026)

Great Egret @ Sunrise. 6:28 am. 70º F. August 19, 2026. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (@dkct25)

— Fiona Mozley, Awake Awake: A Novel (Algonquin Books, August 4, 2026)

Twilight. 5:31 to 5:47 am. 70º F. August 19, 2026. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (@dkct25)

Sunrise. 6:14 to 6:22 am. 70º F. August 19, 2026. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (@dkct25)

As it turns out, you can make a binding vow, to yourself, anywhere, at any time.

I can’t say I was suffering from writer’s block. More accurately: I was suffering from a premature case of writer’s exhaustion. I hadn’t turned thirty yet. I’d spent my twenties largely alone, in a series of rooms, trying to come up with a sentence, and then another, and another. I realized—how had I failed to notice—that I was merely one of uncountable hopeful young writers who believed that if they refused to give up they’d eventually be noticed, when that was likely to happen for one out of a thousand of us, at best. I’d felt sure I was that one in a thousand. But all the others harbored the same conviction, didn’t they? But then, one cold moonless night in my Provincetown studio, I decided—it was a real, conscious decision—that I wanted to keep at it, even if my future turned out to be composed of publishing the occasional story in a literary magazine, and teaching five or six freshman composition classes at a remote college. It wasn’t what I wanted, but if that was my fate, I’d accept it. I wouldn’t go to law school. I wouldn’t learn carpentry. I took a vow, in solitude, in a knotty-pine-paneled room at the tip of Cape Cod, which afforded a view of the house next door and a sliver of Cape Cod Bay. There was nothing momentous about it. But it proved to be a turning point. As it turns out, you can make a binding vow, to yourself, anywhere, at any time.

— Michael Cunningham, Unsayable: A Life in Writing (Random House, July 21, 2026)

— Michael Cunningham, Unsayable: A Life in Writing (Random House, July 21, 2026)

— Robert Seethaler, A Whole Life: A Novel. Translator: Charlotte Collins. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept 13, 2016)

If you could be an animal what would it be?

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals.

— Seamus Heaney, interviewed in The Art of Poetry No. 75

— Fiona Mozley, Awake Awake: A Novel (Algonquin Books, August 4, 2026)

Rumba Anyone? Yellow-Crowned Night Heron. 10:25 am. 77º F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT (@dkct25)

— Fiona Mozley, Awake Awake: A Novel (Algonquin Books, August 4, 2026)

— Fiona Mozley, Awake Awake: A Novel (Algonquin Books, August 4, 2026)

— Chang-Rae Lee, A Tender Age: A Novel (Riverhead Books, August 11, 2026)

— Chang-Rae Lee, A Tender Age: A Novel (Riverhead Books, August 11, 2026)