Lisa Birk

Let us suppose that an era comes, an era of undetermined length, where words come unmoored from meaning. A word like “compassionate” say. No problem. Easy enough to hang onto the definition: To be compassionate is to both understand and to mitigate another’s pain. But...

In the foyer of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson hung maps. All the continents are there, Africa, Asia and so on, cartographed as they were known in the late eighteenth century. There are some close-ups, too, of the tidal basin and the mid-Atlantic states.

Bracketing the fr...

We are in tumultuous times and it is easy to dismiss art, music, writing, maybe particularly writing fiction, as a luxury. I think it is anything but.

My friend, call her Lucy, is the daughter of two immigrants, her Protestant, British mom, who survived the Blitz in Lon...

We write about the other with varying degrees of rigor and success. Homer’s default was narrow (white, male, hetero, warrior), but even that long ago he tasked himself with imagining his way into immortals. Chaucer wrote in the voice of a nun. Shakespeare’s cast includ...

This spring I nearly declared a moratorium on violent fiction after reading three savage novels: The Orphan Master’s Son, The Sympathizer and A Little Life. Afterward life felt dirty. Basta!

After all, the news is horrific: a toddler refugee washes ashore, a white...

Fail Faster, Succeed Quicker

The first time I saw “Fail faster, succeed quicker,” I was at an MIT robotics convention. Don’t ask. The idea being each failure teaches one to design a better experiment–or novel. More failures means more learning means, eventually, success...

The Da Vinci Code is fast paced, a “page-turner.” Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is not. We don’t need Writer’s Digest to define narrative pace as how quickly or slowly the writer takes a reader through the story. And yet crafting pages that quicken (or slow...

At the center of Emily Ross’s YA thriller Half in Love with Death is Caroline. Caroline is the dreamy middle child, younger sister of brash Jess. And last night Jess snuck out the bedroom window. She has not come home.

The perfect choice for narrator, Caroline is the o...

The day Peyton Honeycutt gets his first period it’s a near calamity. Peyton was born female but is a boy. He holes up in the girls’ bathroom, too ashamed to come out. There he meets new girl, Tara Parks. And Tara becomes the object of his desire.

Early on Peyton and Tar...

We are awash in narrative. It arrives on every platform in ever-shorter form. (A Little Life not withstanding.) Which has me wondering, who has the time to dwell in a Brontë moor? And what’s the pay off?

Setting: A History

Nearly 3000 years ago, Homer* described 190** sh...