Guest Blog: Laura Schenone on Writing About the Past
An award-winning memoirist offers advice on writing about family and history — and family history: Tomorrow we arrive in Florida for the holiday, and I can assure you that within a few hours, my mom and I will reach some minor tension over the Thanksgiving Dinner.  For example, I’ll want to scrub and roast the sweet potatoes with olive oil, sea

Under the Influence
When I’m working on a novel I become obsessed with its themes, and look for inspiration anywhere I can find it.  Paintings, photographs, films, poems, essays, novels – everything I take in is filtered through the lens of my current obsession. (I’ve written about some of the visual inspiration for my new novel, Bird in Hand, here and here.) Recently I opened a file I kept whi

Writing Prompts
William Faulkner used to map his stories on his office wall.  If you visit his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his novel in his precise, small handwriting.  When Laura Schenone was writing her memoir, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, she kept photos of her Genovese great grandmother, Adalgisa, propped on her desk, and Adalgisa’s handmade rolling pin nearby.  Edwidge Dandicat has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines. I like learning about writers’ methods, if only because they

Guest Blog: Essayist Maureen Stanton on Why Insight is the Last Thing to Come
For this writer, the creative process happens in stages – and the final one makes all the difference: The first is the molecular stage, that early collection of bits of information, what I find fascinating, unusual, funny or poignant at the time it occurs, whether I retain it in memory or in a physical form on pieces of paper. The critical mass stage is next.  The particle

Priming the Pump
Mondays are hard.  All weekend you’ve been doing laundry, taking family bike rides, reading the Times in bits and pieces, going to your kids’ soccer games, and then it’s Monday morning and they’re all out the door (except the dog, who is lying on your feet), and it’s hard to know where to begin, how to pick up where you left off. When I was growing up in Maine, my professor parents bought an A-frame on a tiny island on a