the writing life

Beneath

By Andre Dubus III, Photography by Doug Bruns

Winter 2015

This was more than thirty years ago. In those days, I could not afford a desk and lamp or a library to put them in; but even if I could, I believe I would have run from that. I preferred to travel lightly, to carry only pencils and a notebook and shadow my nascent fiction like a hunter or neurotic lover.

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Paint tanks in the Tarr and Wonson Paint Factory. Gloucester, MA. (Image courtesy of the Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress)

A Paint-Factory Education

By Mark Edmundson

Fall 2014

The summer after my first year in college, I worked in a paint factory. Packard Paint was a small operation—no more than thirty people worked there—tucked away in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a city of about thirty thousand.

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The Infinite Brunette

By Antonio Skármeta

Winter 2005

Imagine that you were born in an infinitely long and skinny country stretched out between a jagged mountain range and a lively sea that flogs thousands of kilometers.

Imagine now that this country has a poet.

That is to say, A POET.

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