As the news rumbles about future matters electoral and the Federal Government declares the end of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, we revisit our conversation with Elise Engler on her book A Diary of the Plague Year: An Illustrated Chronicle of 2020. Lisa Peet spoke with Engler in December 2021. By Lisa Peet Time is always … Continue reading
Author Archives: Leah De Forest
History worn on the skin: Q&A with Sarah Cypher
Bloom spoke with Arab-American author Sarah Cypher, whose debut novel The Skin and Its Girl is out today. Leah De Forest: First, congratulations! Sarah Cypher: Thank you! I’ve been working on The Skin and Its Girl in some form since the early 2000s, and parts of it have grown up with me as a writer. … Continue reading
Grief Wakes Me Early: A Letter From a Literary Conference
By Lorelei Goulding I sit up in bed after a bad night’s sleep, trying to keep my sniffling quiet. My roommate sleeps across from me, in a cap and socks. She gets cold at night, even in the summer. I have noticed that she has trouble falling asleep too, and maybe that is why they … Continue reading
From Wall Street to the Writer’s Life
Anne Elliott talks to Bloom about transitions: from financial analyst to fiction writer, from New York to Maine, from wanting the writing life to living it. Leah De Forest: You’ve been writing a long time. Can we go back and talk about what your life was like, say, twenty or thirty years ago? Anne Elliott: … Continue reading
BEST OF BLOOM: Sari Botton on Oldster, Aging, and Crooked Career Paths
Periodically, we revisit some of the “best of” Bloom from previous years. Bloom published this Q&A with Sari Botton on February 15, 2022, four months before we featured an excerpt of Botton’s memoir And You May Find Yourself … Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. Lisa Peet caught up with Botton to talk about—as Botton describes … Continue reading
The art of doing your own thing
“There’s a moment where artists start doing what they do. A good example is Rothko: his early work doesn’t look like Rothko. But then all of a sudden everything looks like a Rothko. I feel like that’s probably true of a lot of writers … at some point maybe you settle into the kind of … Continue reading