H.R. Webster has a poem provocatively titled “Failure.” “I have made fun of the way language/ is always finding its own end,” she writes. “I have made fun of these […]
Books & Poetry
READING ROOM
What Do You Wish For?
At the Provincetown library, a migration story
Wishes is a children’s book written by Muon Thi Van and illustrated by Victo Ngai. It chronicles one family’s migration from Vietnam. It was chosen by children in both the […]
LINE BREAK
Not Just Another Poem About the Moon
Donika Kelly writes of ‘feelings,’ namely love
I have a lot of feelings and always have. In fact, it’s why I began writing poems in high school. Feelings! So many feelings. Feelings that needed a safe place […]
WRITERS
That Feeling of Silent Communion With a Place
Far from Nepal, Samyak Shertok finds his home in poetry
“They came unarmed. They came/ half-masked. They came/ before the crow. They came/ with the moon. They came/ moonless. They came/ out of rain. They came/ as their enemy. They […]
WRITERS
Molly Anders’s Characters Confess All
‘Funny accounts of downfall’ from a childhood filled with AA meetings
A huge water heater lives in the middle of writer Molly Anders’s tiny kitchen. “This is Louis,” she says, gesturing as she makes coffee. She says all the other Fine […]
WRITERS
Wandering the Topkapı Palace With Zeynep Özakat
A ‘novel in protest’ about a haunted harem
“Narrative weaves through many aspects of our lives in ways we are often not even aware of,” says the Turkish-born writer Zeynep Özakat. Her first novel, which she is working […]
POETS
Writing of the Past, for the Future
Laura Cresté’s poems explore complex family dynamics
Laura Cresté still has Mead notebooks full of the nature poems she started writing around age six. She wrote one after watching a seagull attack a crab while on the […]
WRITERS
The Internet as a Place of Fracture and Connection
For Tracy Fuad, identity transcends geographic borders
Tracy Fuad was born the same month as the internet: March 1989. In her most recent poetry collection, about:blank, published in October, she describes the web as a bridge between […]
WRITERS
De-Generalizing the ‘Native Experience’
A FAWC fellow writes of growing up on the Blackfeet Reservation
“There’s very little legitimate literature about Native people,” says Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. “It wasn’t until I […]
WRITERS
For Shastri Akella, Telling Stories Is a Labor of Love
An Indian-born author finds his queer identity in his prose
Shastri Akella’s first novel, The Sea Elephants, begins with these lines: “My father left the country the year my sisters were born. He returned six months after I watched them […]
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Mad Libs Poetry: A Starter Kit
Swapping noun for noun, verb for verb, to create something new
Poets build poems within the shells of earlier work, caterpillar to moth. We learn to write by reading and echoing until something clicks that feels genuine and new. I love […]
WRITERS
In His Poems, Eduardo Martinez-Leyva Discovers Who He Is
A journey from West Texas to Provincetown and back
“I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas,” says Eduardo Martinez-Leyva, a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown who will give an online poetry reading on […]
IN THE STACKS
Every Child Is an Artist (and Vice Versa)
Juliet Kepes’s Bauhaus mural adorns the Wellfleet Public Library
There’s some serious art hanging in the kids’ section of the Wellfleet Public Library. A mural by Juliet Kepes features stylized animals cavorting on washy fields of color. It’s light […]
BOOK REVIEW
In Unthinkable, Memory Is Vital
A year later, Jamie Raskin reckons with his son’s suicide and the Jan. 6 insurrection
Congressman Jamie Raskin’s new memoir is about surviving the end of his world, and a warning about preventing the end of ours. On Dec. 31, 2020, his brilliant and empathetic […]
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Digging Dugan
A poem in which what seems dark and bleak becomes, somehow, hopeful
Poetry is an invitation to slow down and think more deeply about experiences, observations, perplexities, beauties, enragements, and delights. Good poetry helps us see more honestly and accurately. Sometimes poems […]
