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Pilgrimage
by Alice Lowe What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in...
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The Desk Drawer Novel: A Tale of Urgency, Panic, and Truth
by Robin Black In an ideal world, if you start your career in your forties, whatever urgency you feel will result in productive efficiency. In my case, that has sometimes been the case. But there is a...
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Messing Up the Drawing Room: Wharton, Olsen, and the Quest for Validation
by Jessica Levine 1. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton recounts her initiation into writing: My first attempt (at the age of eleven) was a novel, which began: “Oh, how do you do,...
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The Fraudulent Writer
by A.X. Ahmad In my early 30s, I signed up for my first fiction writing class through an adult education program. We met one evening a week in the teacher’s freezing kitchen and sat around her scarred...
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BEST OF BLOOM: “Up ‘Til Now”
The following is an encore post, originally published at Bloom on April 23, 2014 by Lauren Francis-Sharma I was in line waiting to have a novel autographed by a famous author who had written her first...
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EXPERIENCE REQUIRED: Hot Dogs & Maid Service
by Bonnie ZoBell Explaining to a writing student who’s just said she’s going to be on the bestseller list next year that it’s a little tougher than that isn’t one of my favorite jobs. Do I tell her...
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EXPERIENCE REQUIRED: Be All the People You Can Be
by Anjali Mitter Duva 1. In my grandparents’ dining room in a suburb of Boston, there was a shelf devoted to the books by our family members. My grandfather was a poet—a witty, brilliant one, but also...
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Hours Most Impelling
by Meganne Fabrega 1. It was one short paragraph in her obituary that caught my eye: “When she was 16 she made her first contribution to the press. Three years later her first book was published. It...
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Two Years, 134 Bloomers: Reflections on Julia Child, Bloomer & Shaker
by Sonya Chung 1. I counted the names three times over just to make sure: but yes, it’s true, as of this week—the two-year anniversary of Bloom’s launching in November 2012—we’ve featured 100 authors....
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The Spinning Self: On Pottery and the Rest of My Life
by Amy Weldon Tucked away on a side street in our little Iowa town—between the cemetery-monuments shop and the local supermarket with fir trees, pumpkins, or tomato seedlings lined up outside according...
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BEST OF BLOOM: Hours Most Impelling
The following is an encore post, originally published at Bloom on October 24, 2014 by Meganne Fabrega 1. It was one short paragraph in her obituary that caught my eye: “When she was 16 she made her...
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BEST OF BLOOM: Quilting Without a Pattern—On Making a First Novel
The following is an encore post, originally published at Bloom on March 21, 2014 by Kim Church I don’t quilt. I don’t even sew. But I regularly watch a sewing show, which for me is like watching magic....
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Harvesting Hope
by Tricia Stearns I slid the debit card through the hole of a large plexus-glass window. The movie attendant’s large, watermelon earrings dangled below her bleached hair and full, round face; the...
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Agnes Martin’s Perfection: Now and Not Yet
by Sonya Chung 1. I come back to Agnes Martin again and again. This time, I did not anticipate how difficult—how disturbing—it would be to re-engage with her work. I thought I knew something about...
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Rescue From the Jaded Boomer Blues
by Judy Chicurel Around the middle of 2013, I became tired of other people’s stories. A strange thing for a writer to be saying, but it was true—and baffling at the same time. As a journalist, I had...
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Lucky
by Michele Beller 1. Jessica Stern’s memoir is aptly titled: Denial: A Memoir of Terror. Stern opens by describing a terrifying experience, indeed: at 15, she and her 14-year-old sister were raped, at...
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A Page a Day
by Lynn Sloan April. It shouldn’t snow in April, but I was stuck in a snowstorm in evening rush hour traffic on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. Ahead, four lanes of red taillights crept up the rise at...
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Living Time, Writing Time: Narrating the Fourth Dimension in Fiction
by Jessica Levine 1. When I was around fifteen and my father almost sixty, he said something that shocked me: “There are whole chapters of my life that I can’t remember.” And he proceeded to tell me...
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Extreme Parenting
by Tim Weed I wasn’t worried for my own safety, but I was frightened on behalf of my 13-year-old son. The truth is, I hadn’t fully appreciated the difficulty of the spot I’d gotten us into. Below us, a...
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BEST OF BLOOM: Be All the People You Can Be
The following is an encore post, originally published at Bloom on October 17, 2014 by Anjali Mitter Duva 1. In my grandparents’ dining room in a suburb of Boston, there was a shelf devoted to the books...
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