Poetry—it isn’t just for poets! In her latest column, Katie Umans recommends straying from fiction with the following books: Kingdom Animalia, Something in the Potato Room, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, and Lucky Fish.

Did you know that periodically, the French comb through their language and pick out interloping words? The Academie Francaise, charged with publishing an official (if non-binding) dictionary of French, intermittently posts lists of banned English words that have wormed their way into the French language. In previous years, the Academie has suggested banning [...]

A good place to die? Mary François Rockcastle’s second novel In Caddis Wood unfolds as call and response between a husband facing terminal illness, and his wife of more than thirty years. What does it look like to draw strength from a shared past, even as the future dwindles?

Is your writing lean and trim? Or does it need to shed some flab? Recently, user Leigh posted on FWR’s Facebook wall about an interesting writing-analysis tool, WritersDiet. Intrigued, I clicked on over. WritersDiet is a free online tool that analyzes a sample of your text. Paste in any text [...]

Jennifer Solheim examines the polyphony of both Natacha Appanah’s The Last Brother and the translation process in general. In this essay, she reveals how language structure impacts emotional resonance in the narrative—and for the reader.

When I was an MFA student at the University of Maryland, Stanley Plumly said two things about my poetry that have stuck with me and shaped not only how I think about my writing process but also how I approach teaching creative writing.
In one conference, he asked, Will you ever write a ten-syllable line? Stanley [...]

Before submitting stories to workshop in graduate school, I spent hours combing my sentences for inefficiencies. I scrutinized verbs. I wrenched clauses from passive construction. I asked myself some hard questions about adjectives. My classmates often called my writing “clean,” which pleased me. I aspired toward concision.
One term workshop was led by an intimidating man [...]

Not a poet? Perhaps you are. David Brooks points out that we all use metaphors in our daily speech, all the time, without even knowing it:
When talking about relationships, we often use health metaphors. A friend might be involved in a sick relationship. Another might have a healthy marriage.
When talking about argument, we use [...]

Neurolinguist Philip Davis is studying the effects of Shakespeare on the brain. Big Think has more info:
In all of his plays, sonnets and narrative poems, Shakespeare used 17,677 words. Of these, he invented approximately 1,700, or nearly 10 percent. Shakespeare did this by changing the part of speech of words, adding prefixes and suffixes, [...]

Raised in Greece during its period of intensive Westernization, Giota Tachtara lived all her life among things that had two names, two qualities, two associations, and two accents: one in Greek and one in English. Now, as an American resident, she roots through her bilingual bookcase and writes about the narrator in her head who’s caught in the middle.