Activity

The Künstlerroman, a bildungsroman that focuses on the development of an artist, is a genre traditionally associated with youth and coming of age, but anyone who has ever tried to make art knows the process of becoming an artist never ends. In Garner’s diaries, we find, among other things, a stunni…

When people talk about personal narrative as a literary form, there is almost always a bias toward the insights made available by hindsight. But what can you see as you are coming down the road? “Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it,” Garner has said, inviting us to consider the possibility t…

The writer Catherine Lacey once brilliantly described the difficulty of writing about experiences you’re still living as “trying to make a bed while you’re still in it,” but as I read Garner’s diaries, I kept thinking that perhaps not every bed needs to be made. Sometimes we want the unmade beds, w…

He looked at me, his look of love and reproach. My love for him could not save him. His love for life could not save him. It was the first time that I truly knew he was going to die. He was suffering physical torment no man should endure. He looked at me with such deep apology that it was unbearabl…

[...] I was in limbo when I left Twenty-third Street. My sister Linda got me a part-time job at the Strand Book Store. I bought stacks of books, but I didn’t read them. I taped sheets of paper to the wall, but I didn’t draw. I slid my guitar under the bed. At night, alone, I just sat and waited. On…