-
Why I Write: Melissa Clark
Someone once said of the great food writer M.F.K. Fisher: she was a passionate woman and food was her metaphor. It's an image that has stuck with me throughout my career, the idea that what we eat is a touchstone for human existence, and that food writing can tell us about so much more than what was on the plate.
-
Why I Write: Stephanie Pearl McPhee
The first time I wrote this essay, trying to explain why I write, I wrote what I've heard other authors say. Essentially (but really well) I repeated the grand idea that writers write because they must—the fire for the literary art burns so brightly in us that without writing as a form of expression, we would scarcely have a reason to go on. Now, after I typed that, I realized that I'm either more shallow or more complex, because I think I have another reason.
-
Why I Write: Laird Barron
My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet. I didn't realize this until much later in life, after I'd written half a million words of my own; didn't appreciate this fact until after he died in 1993, alone on a gold claim in the Yukon wilderness.
-
Why I Write: Siobhan Fallon
An army base is a strange place. An army base in a time of war , especially after 4,000 men pack up their duffel bags, put on their uniforms, and leave their wives and children for an entire year. In You Know When the Men Are Gone, I attempt to show that world and the moments that lead up to the separation, the long and difficult absence, the return.
-
Why I Write: Eileen Dreyer
When I was on maternity leave with my second child, I got the bright idea to read all the classic literature I'd missed in school. Don't get me wrong. I had an excellent education. But I went through high school during the '60s, which meant that instead of Silas Marner, I read Animal Farm. Instead of Dickens, Ralph Ellison. I managed to avoid most English Victorian authors, as well as all the French and Russians.
-
Why I Write: Steven Saylor
I can't remember the bookshop, or the city where it happened. I can't even remember which book I was promoting, or much about the reader who asked it—but I'll never forget the question.
-
Why I Write: Naomi Novik
"My grandmother, among other varied professions undertaken during an eventful life, once sold vowels in the market on Tuesdays in Warsaw."
-
Why I Write: Tina Chang
When I began writing poems, I was struck by how much a poem looked like the physical structure of a house. Each word seemed like a window, each comma a blade of grass, each line was a slow locomotive passing through a quiet town.
-
Why I Write: Mark Kurlansky
To answer the question of why I wrote my newest book, The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís, I first have to ask why I write at all. I have thought a great deal about why I spend usually more than 50 hours a week alone in a room having a conversation with myself.
-
Why I Write: Steven Raichlen
It's noon on the Ile de Re, France, and I'm about to experience eclade de moules, mussels grilled on a bed of flaming pine needles. It's 2 p.m. in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and I've turned my back on the Angkor Wat temple complex to feast on coconut-grilled corn from a gritty stall in the parking lot. It's midnight in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and I'm watching a gaucho grill master carve dinosaur-sized costelas (beef ribs) cooked on a military-strength rotisserie. Why do I write? Because nothing makes me feel more alive than when I'm in the field doing research-in this case for a book called Planet Barbecue.
-
Why I Write: Frances Mayes
As a child in Fitzgerald, Ga., way back in the middle of the last century (that sounds so archaic), I was struck with the power of the land. Always, I felt the primal potency beneath my black Mary Janes (polished with Vaseline). A tornado might lift me and the bathtub into the sky. Sinkholes swallowed whole houses.
-
Why I Write: Jon Katz
A reporter asked me recently why there are so many dog books. I told him I always wondered why there aren't more, since so many people want to read them.
-
Why I Write: Antony Beevor
"Then, with the ignorance and arrogance of youth, I decided to become a writer despite my complete lack of qualifications."
-
Why I Write: Deepak Chopra
A clue to why I write came on the day in medical school when I walked into the room where students meet a cadaver for the first time. My scalpel incised a thin line in the parchment-yellow skin, cutting from the breastbone down the belly, and in one stroke the mystery of the human body was revealed. Yet another mystery was destroyed at the same time.
-
Why I Write: Michael Psilakis
I grew up in a Greek bubble on Long Island, nurtured by immigrant parents who raised their kids as though they had never left the homeland. Through a tumultuous adolescence and into young adulthood, writing was one of the few outlets I had to express my emotions. It was a valuable part of my life. As I got older, though, and eventually found that my true passion was cooking, the written word fa...
-
Why I Write: Zane
Over the past 12 years, I have read many articles and heard many people speak about why I write my books. Funny, none of the people making the statements know me or how my mind truly works. Ironically, I never chose to write erotica; erotica chose me. I wrote a few stories, posted them on the Internet and realized that there was a niche market that was not being met in the African-American comm...
-
Why I Write: Conrad Williams
If I wasn't exploring my fears in this way, I don't know what I'd be doing. Quite possibly scratching my name into a cell wall in some psychiatric prison hospital.
-
Why I Write: Jimmy Santiago Baca
I'm a poet and I've written a dozen or so poetry books, a collection of essays, short stories and a memoir, but never a novel until now.
-
Why I Write: William J. Mann
Never having prospected for gold, I can't say for sure, but I suspect the thrill of unearthing a good, untold story is similar to what miners felt when they discovered a shiny raw nugget in a Yukon riverbank. When I chanced upon the story of William Haines more than a decade ago, I knew I had struck gold.
Browse archive by date:
