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On Reading & Writing

"St. Cecilia," John William Waterhouse, 1895.
  • Calvino, Italo. Why Read the Classics?, Vintage, 1991. | Internet Archive
  • Fish, Stanley. "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One," Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard University Press, 1980. pp. 322-337. | Internet Archive
  • Gallop, Jane. "The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters," Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Fall 2000. | PDF
  • Kimmerer, Robin Wall. "Skywoman Falling," Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013, pp. 3-10. | PDF
  • Lamott, Anne. "Shitty First Drafts," Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anchor, 1994, pp. 93-96. | PDF
  • Lefray, Blake. "What's the Point of Writing Fiction?", YouTube, 2025.
  • Le Guin, Ursula K. "The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction," 1986. | The Anarchist Library
  • Levertov, Denise. "Some Notes on Organic Form," Poetry, 1965. | The Poetry Foundation
  • Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Harvard University Press, 1992. | Internet Archive
  • Rich, Adrienne. What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, W.W. Norton, 2003. | Internet Archive
  • Ruefle, Mary. "On Secrets: Eight Beginnings, Two Ends," Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, Wave Books, 2012, pp. 73-102. | Internet Archive
  • Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, Random House, 2021. | Internet Archive
  • Shklovsky, Viktor. "Art as Technique," A Theory of Prose, 1917. | PDF
  • Smith, Zadie. "Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction," The New York Review of Books, Oct 2019. | PDF
  • Sontag, Susan. "Against Interpretation," Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966 | Internet Archive
  • Templeton, Molly. "The Joy of Reading Books You Don't Entirely Understand," Reactor Mag, Jun 2024
  • Vonnegut, Kurt. Any of his lectures on The Shape of Stories. Here is a recording of one.