Suspend Your Disbelief

Danielle Lazarin

Contributor

Danielle Lazarin is the author of Back Talk: Stories (Penguin, 2018). Her award-winning short fiction can be found in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Glimmer Train, Five Chapters, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She lives in her native New York, where she is raising her daughters and working on a novel.


Articles

Interviews |

The Story of Who We Are: An Interview with Stephanie Jimenez

“I’m Costa Rican-Colombian-American. And to constantly try to explain yourself with a hyphen, with saying you’re a little bit of this and a little bit of that, is tiresome and disorienting.” Stephanie Jimenez talks with Danielle Lazarin about the complexities of female friendships, self-knowledge, how we market literature, and more.


Shop Talk |

“The Mommy Problem,” and the Larger Notion of Life Beyond Work

From the Archives: “Work can be your life, but your life can (and I’d argue, should be) bigger than your work”: Danielle Lazarin on writing, motherhood, and how the things in our lives that we give ourselves permission to experience that aren’t writing might in the end offer us new perspectives on both writing and our selves.


Interviews |

Unanswered Questions: An Interview with Dan Chaon

“I’ve always felt personally and emotionally closer to the searchers, rather than to the finders…to those who don’t get answers, as opposed to those who do. For me, the experience of epiclitus is closely related to the experience of the uncanny, but also to the experience of complex and problematic emotions, like yearning, and awe, and psychic unease, which are of particular interest to me. That precipice of endless uncertainty, of the impenetrable—those are the moments that I’ve always loved in literature, as well as the moments that have haunted me in life.”


Shop Talk |

"The Mommy Problem," and the larger notion of life beyond work

Over at The Millions, Sonya Chung’s essay “The Mommy Problem” throws more questions at a question I’m still trying to answer. I, too, have indulged in her habit of close-reading women writers’ biographies for suggestions of children and clues as to their familial satisfaction to productivity ratio. While the argument over how writers should spend their time, money, and reproductive organs is endless, and as Chung points out, ultimately individual and unanswerable even through close examination of the examples we have, the question of how acceptable or manageable it is to be a writer-slash—whether that slash is a parent, a […]