The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, Samantha Hunt talks about the “dead people’s things” that surround her writing desk, why writers should “revise forever,” and why she works on many projects at the same time.

The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, Lauren Wilkinson talks about making writing a habit, why she runs errands when she’s stuck, and protecting time for your writing.

Navigating the ins and outs of the publishing industry can feel like a Sisyphean journey, filled with opaque directions and endless confusing routes to nowhere. How does a book get published? What do you do when you have a manuscript that you’re ready to move forward with? And do you really need a literary agent?

Phil Klay is the New York Times bestselling author of Redeployment, which among other accolades won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014. A Marine Corps veteran, Klay writes extensively on issues ranging from religion to combat to national and foreign policy. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Men’s Journal, and more.

As a civilian war writer, I’ve been familiar with Phil Klay’s work for years, but have not had the opportunity to speak to him until this interview. Our conversation covers considerable ground, touching on everything from writing craft to national security to reading lists of contemporary war literature.

In an interview with nonfiction MFA candidate Katie Shepherd, Chelsea Hodson speaks to writing from the self, interrogating ideas, and the joys and melancholies of life. Chelsea is the author of the book of essays Tonight I’m Someone Else and the chapbook Pity the Animal. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony and PEN Center USA Emerging Voices and teaches at Catapult and Mors Tua Vita Mea.

The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, Jericho Brown discusses his (lack of) writing desk, the books that inspire him as a writer, and the one thing that makes writers better.

On Monday, October 22, I spoke with artists Katie Giritlian and Esteban Jefferson about their collaboration and here,. The work will be released as the second issue of prompt:, a new publication from Mira Dayal and Nicole Kaack that asks two artists who have never worked together to produce a publication presented as a draft for further research. and here, takes the form of an email thread between Giritlian and Jefferson dating from July 2 to August 23, 2018. It launches today, Friday, October 26, at the CUE Art Foundation in Manhattan.

In an interview with MFA candidate Raffi Joe Wartanian, John McPhee reflects on the panic, procrastination, and prolific output behind his celebrated approach to nonfiction. McPhee’s 38th book The Patch is one of seven essay collections for the longtime Princeton University faculty member and alumnus who began writing for The New Yorker in 1963. A recipient of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize (General Nonfiction) and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, McPhee is regarded as one of the major figures in helping shape the form of creative nonfiction.

In this interview with emerging and award-winning poet and Columbia MFA alumna Susannah Nevison, Nevison talks about disability, mass incarceration, and her upcoming collection, Lethal Theater (Ohio State University Press, 2019). Nevison is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College.

In this interview, the poet Mary Ann Samyn talks about her first encounters with Emily Dickinson’s work, her best advice for writing students, and her new collection, Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance, out now from 42 Miles Press.

In this interview with MFA candidate Sarah Rosenthal, Nicole Chung talks about confronting family lore surrounding her adoption, discovering revision ideas in her dreams, and editing a memoir while grieving. Chung is the author of the forthcoming memoir All You Can Ever Know, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, GQ, Longreads, and Hazlitt.

In this interview, the poet Bill King talks about his new poetry collection, The Letting Go, what he’s learned from fatherhood, and the importance of sacred spaces for writers.

In this interview, MFA nonfiction candidate Dodie Miller-Gould speaks with writer and Columbia professor Deborah Eisenberg. Eisenberg is the author of Your Duck is My Duck, forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins on September 25. Eisenberg’s work is polite but poignant. Her characters are drawn with an intelligence that engages readers.

Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, her first book, is a provocative, enlightening, and often depressing piece of nonfiction about women and their anger. Each chapter is thematically oriented and researched to startlingly lucid detail, using a lens through which women and men are compared in order to highlight the savage disparities between the two. These topics range from the bleakly mundane, like workplace relations and domestic labor, to the downright harrowing; a particularly difficult chapter to digest recounts sexual assault cases (many ending in rape and murder), listed one after the other like a morbid shopping list. It may sound off-puttingly clinical, but that’s entirely the point. Chemaly’s voice is research-driven, and impeccably so; allowing the pervasive everyday of gender bias to wash over the reader without their immediate knowledge.

In conversation with Columbia Journal’s Online Poetry Editor Brian Wiora, the poet Richie Hofmann discusses growing up in Germany, reading translated poems, and of course, his poetry. After reading this interview, we hope you will read a selection of his poems, published on the Columbia Journal website.

The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, the writer Olivia Laing discusses the spaces she works, the one skill that writers need, and the writers she returns to again and again. Her novel Crudo will be released in the U.S. on September 10, 2018.