Two decades after his death, my father still troubles me. He remains a mystery and a contradiction—the man my mother loved, who sat each night at the head of the table, silently carving the roast. The man my brothers and I barely knew. Dinners were...

As diverse as our stories may be poets are nevertheless in the process of creating a single art, some trace of what we were able to accomplish with our language before we inevitably canceled each other out. Eventually, through lurking, inescapable age, or cataclysm,...

I’m a little in love with the idea that a poem is an occasion for two people to share a trouble, whatever the outcome of that trouble might be. So, I would say that the listener I would want is a person with whom...

Some years ago, a friend wrote to me admiring what he called at the time my “bivalve poems.” I thought he meant how a lot of the poems in my new book consisted of two stanzas of equal length, and that was partly true....

Find an example of wood with your eyes. The floorboards, a door, trim around the window, cutting board, kitchen table, the sycamore there. Imagine it against your knuckles as you rap on it. Feel how hard. Hear the knock. Now, add time. Not that...

As an academic philosopher and the author of many books of poetry, I’m often asked about the relationship between poetry and philosophy. What I’ve usually said in the past is something along these lines: Philosophy and poetry can both be ways of responding to...

For as long as I can remember, I have composed poems from the bits of language revolving in my head when no more pressing thoughts intrude. While out for a walk or running an errand, a phrase or stanza might start up and repeat...

“Leon felt nothing but horny for Nate at this point. That hurt. Everything was hateful apart from how wildly he longed for that fucker.” —Period Sometimes a line in someone else’s book will tell you, more clearly and succinctly than you have ever been able...

As a novelist I am wary of what is often called “research,” by which I mean reading detailed, real-life criminal cases or news stories and using those details, or the structure of those narratives, in a narrative of my own. This is partly due...

My novel, The Made-Up Man, began with an inside joke. In 2005, when I was twenty-two, I backpacked Europe for a month with my buddy Andrew. We toured cities we’d already heard of, but also decided, just for the hell of it,...

When I began researching Bringing Down the Colonel some ten years ago, I was confident that I was writing “history.” I hoped that by telling the story of a lost, late Gilded Age sex scandal, I could shed light on how far women had...

Hideo Yokohama’s masterpiece Seventeen is set in a fictional newspaper company covering the real-life 1985 crash of a Japan Airlines jumbo jet in a mountainous region of Japan. The accident happened before I moved to Japan, but it is a major (well, infamous)...

Lucia Berlin was a Western writer, by which I do not mean a genre writer of cowboy tales like Zane Grey or the younger Elmore Leonard, but that her stories, with only a few exceptions, are situated west of the Great Plains or in...

Just weeks before his death in late 2016, Leonard Cohen said he was ready for the end to come—he just needed a bit more time to put his last book in order. The Flame is this final work from the revered poet and...

For my mother’s seventy-first birthday, I bought her a beautiful pair of forest-green gloves at Settimio Mieli in Rome. Nestled into a small street just steps away from the bustling Piazza San Silvestro, Settimio Mieli is a tiny oasis of luxury, with stacks of...

The first time I remember seeing termites I didn’t even know what they were. A cluster of bugs with long translucent wings appeared on the side of a friend’s Northern California garage while we were drinking cocktails on the deck. They seemed to spurt...

Write about what captivates. This principle didn’t occur to me until Mysterium was finished, but now I believe in the words wholeheartedly. It was fascination and reverence for the mountains that bore the novel forward. You could say I was taken captive by...

The characters in my novel Early Work think they know everything. In fact, they only know a few things, and most of it is half-remembered (at best) from books or films or articles they’ve seen or read. One of the things they (and...

The history of storytelling has always been one of shouting around a fire, and of the loudest voices retaining control of the larger narrative. This, of course, means certain things in patriarchal society. Stories about cis-gendered men and about whiteness and straightness as an...

As anyone who writes historical fiction knows, research becomes your partner. If you do too much, it becomes your master, weighing down the narrative; too little, the reader fails to be transported to the world of the book. The primary challenge I give myself...