Julia Shipley is a freelance writer based in rural Vermont where she serves as a contributing editor and columnist for Yankee Magazine and a contributing writer to Seven Days: Vermont’s Independent Weekly.
If Dan Barry has a beat, it is humanity — humanity as it reckons with its triumphs and travesties, and, sometimes, its profound secrets. Why does Barry begin a story about a long-hidden trove of bones with a girl … Read more
In August 1991, I read John Cheever’s journal excerpts published in The New Yorker. I was a 19-year-old college dropout, a waitress, and in the half hour before starting my shift, I sat outside my local library, electrified by this candid, … Read more
It’s hard to cull just one sentence from Sedaris’ embedded reporting on being a helper at Santaland, a place he describes as “a real wonderland” with a path taking visitors through the “ten thousand sparkling lights, false snow, train sets, … Read more
Matthew Pearl is a sucker for underdog stories, origin stories and untold stories. Those all came together when the author of best-selling historical fiction thrillers such as “The Dante Club” and “The Poe Shadow” asked: Who were America’s first detectives? And … Read more
Barely three years ago, Aaron Mahnke, a part-time horror-thriller writer, sat at his computer and started to drag a document to the trashcan. Just as he was about dispose of the sprawling essay he’d written with outtakes from his supernatural … Read more
For more than 15 years now, Ted Genoways has been exploring narratives of how America reaps its food. “I think that every story works best when the writer is something of an insider-outsider and then finds a main subject … Read more
In March, The New York Times announced that its India-based South Asia bureau chief, Ellen Barry, would relocate to London to become chief international correspondent. Accordingly, Barry loaded everything she owned onto a container ship in Mumbai that was already … Read more
Why is it great? Written long before every person carried a camera, before Facebook, back when “streaming” was just what water did as it coursed through its bed, Goyen, raised in a small town in East Texas, believed we could … Read more
In the winter of 2012, a pair of lovers set dozens of fires over a span of 20 weeks in remote Accomack County, Virginia—once the richest rural county in America, and now one of the poorest. As one or two … Read more
In addition to the music of Blythe’s lush language, I love how he captures this brash paradox–that a chorus can make us feel so lonely. Furthermore I love how, like a quintessential writer, he stations himself on an edge between … Read more
