Writing: Turning Pain Into Honey

Once, in a New Yorker article, [John Updike had] quoted the German philosopher Theodor Adorno: “In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” But the poems he was writing were good. He knew the poems were good. Before he got sick, Updike had been afraid...

Humbled By the Story

Flannery O’Connor wrote in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” that most people who write “are more interested in being a writer than in writing. They are interested in seeing their names at the top of something printed, it matters not what.” This, I realized once I’d...