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
Category Archives: Features
An Excerpt from Joan Frank’s essay collection, Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading
Joel Agee, author of The Stone World, said of Joan Frank’s essay collection, “Late Work is one of the best books on writing and the writing life I have ever read….It is above all a book about art and the role, both tempering and freeing, that aging plays in an artist’s life and work.” 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
Dancing with the Muse in Old Age: A Profile of Priscilla Long
by Alice Lowe
At 79, she proudly claims and defends the word “old.” Further, there are no such things as “senior moments”; we all, at any age, forget where we left our keys or glasses now and then. Continue reading
Q&A with Hilma Wolitzer
by Lisa Peet
“I never think in terms of topics, and I never think in terms of readers. What happens is that, at the risk of sounding like Joan of Arc, I hear a voice in my head that just says the first sentence of the story.” Continue reading