by Mark Alvarez

My old San Francisco neighborhood has two hearts: Portsmouth Square and Washington Square. While the former is something whose name is unrecognized even by many San Franciscans, part of the vagueness they thrust upon Chinatown–despite being the spot where the state of California was founded–the latter is one of the most well-loved public spaces in the City, a tree-lined green slope decompressing North Beach density, perfect for absorbing the between-fog sun.
… More Requiem for a Kool-Aid Wino: Why is Richard Brautigan, the Original George Saunders, Still Ignored?

NonfictionNOW featured a slew of diverse writers and panels this year. During the panel “Decolonizing Nonfiction,” four Southeast Asian authors brought a perspective to nonfiction that I had not yet seen as a young, Latina woman growing up in the Southwestern United States. They began the panel by introducing which parts of Southeast Asia they had come from so that the audience could understand the circumstances that had informed their writing. I found it interesting as writers Daryll Delgado, Lawrence LacambraYpil, Wilfredo Pascual, and Ruihe Zhang sat before an audience of predominantly white writers and explained their journey into the world of nonfiction–an “American invention,” as Zhang calls is. … More Decolonizing Nonfiction: What it Means to Write in an ‘American Invention’

A hermit crab essay is one that imitates a non-literary text—recipe, obituary, rejection letter—using the found form in novel ways, but retaining the semantic resonance of the original. … More The Hermit Crab Essay: Brenda Miller Unshells her Own