by Lillian Ann Slugocki
The diction is razor sharp, the approach direct, and the persona doesn’t mind offending you. She’s as transgressive as the heroine in Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” rising out of the ash, except the serious writer is on a broomstick, wearing Groucho Marx glasses.
by Nicole Wolverton
Julia Child may be the very symbol of culinary prowess and French cookery in America, but she was a true late bloomer: she graduated from the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris when she was 39. Her Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published when she was 49, and her TV cooking show, The French Chef, premiered when she was 50.
by Jennifer Acker
He has been hailed as a writer who excels in the investigation of memory, but it’s not a fixed past that offers the siren’s call; it is a past that dreams of and anticipates a future full of longing for itself.
I found flash fiction (originally called short-shorts) in the 1980s when my brain exploded reading the work of Amy Hempel. Around the same time, the tiny, densely sad and gorgeous chapters of Monkeys by Susan Minot similarly stole my heart. Continue reading »
by Jennifer Acker
The “furniture” in my life remains the same; but as a writer, I’ve just moved it around. Since I always write in the first person, readers have a tendency to believe (or to suspect) that I am writing autobiographically. They may or may not be wrong. Continue reading »
by Vicraj Gill
Here at Bloom, we confess to a disproportionate coverage of prose writers. With the following list of poets who bloomed after 40, we hope to begin remedying that. Continue reading »
A first-time visitor might have a hard time seeing the natural beauty of the land as I experienced it growing up, or would have to travel far afield to do so. But I felt absolutely at home, as if a veil or film had been lifted from my eyes and I had returned to the real world—all my American years thrown into a second reality. Continue reading »
by Evelyn Somers
If her African childhood was exotic, her religious upbringing would seem even more so in the academic circles Orr had entered as an adult. To talk about her background among her colleagues felt “scandalous.”
Continue reading »
by Vicraj Gill
“It can be very circuitous to find your way to what’s plain, what’s natural to you, the best forms for your mind.” It was those very circuits that eventually led her back to her first loves, literature and writing. Continue reading »
Why do I keep doing it, then? Because it’s a challenge, and I’m compelled to do it, and I love being inside the process of writing a novel, of thinking about it all the time and figuring out structure and motifs and themes and connections. In a way, I’m still a tinkerer, building things with words. Continue reading »
