Jill Talbot

“The first time I walked through the spacious house, I didn't see possibility or a new start. I saw a big, empty…

— Jill Talbot

It's been very jarring for me to stand in public and read about myself and my daughter and her father. I feel…

— Jill Talbot

There's a moment in Sarah Manguso's The Guardians when she writes, "I try not to make anything up, and I fail every…

— Jill Talbot

“I think language beautifully full of the poetry of immanent clarification of some small pinprick of what living might mean. Fuck. Why…

— Jill Talbot

“write down all of the things out in the world that have arrested your attention lately, that have glimmered at you in…

— Jill Talbot

“Everyone now, not just writers, creates a written, published persona on a daily (hourly) basis. Artifice abounds.”

— Jill Talbot

“metawriting can be viewed as "the act of doing something outside of the game in order to impact what is actually occurring…

— Jill Talbot

I like to think about the genre, the essay or the memoir, as much as I enjoy writing within its fluid parameters.…

— Jill Talbot

How long do we live in the fictions of our past? And how do we convince anyone that who we write is…

— Jill Talbot

“I like it when art presents a paradigm shift, when it forces me to confront my assumptions, when it asks, "Why this…

— Jill Talbot

When I admire a writer, it's for the recognizable palette - Hemingway's minimalism, the dialogue, those isolated bar scenes. But with each…

— Jill Talbot

“WHEN IT WAS DECIDED (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all supposed to choose between fiction and nonfiction,…

— Jill Talbot

“linear narrative was not doing a very good job representing life as I experienced it,”

— Jill Talbot

“sometimes it is necessary for us all to pretend together that language can really mean.”

— Jill Talbot

“Okay, let's say that a metamove or metagesture is when the author intentionally draws attention to a work's genre, its very existence…

— Jill Talbot

“A shattered narrative is still a narrative. We can't escape it, it is what we are.”

— Jill Talbot

“Then one day, I just let it go, and started thinking about the essay as not trying to solve a riddle of…

— Jill Talbot

Simply put, meta-writing is writing that is self-conscious, self-reflective, and aware of itself as an artifice. The writer is aware she's writing,…

— Jill Talbot

“A mind that moves associatively (as my mind does and probably your mind too) like a firefly in a grassy yard on…

— Jill Talbot

We read the world - television, movies, songs, books - and the people in it through the lens of our own lives.

— Jill Talbot

One of my friends who writes novels says that once the book is published, it's a separate thing from you; it becomes…

— Jill Talbot

“What would she have thought as a teenage girl arranging her artfully wasted limbs against the dais of a highly conceptual sculpture?”

— Jill Talbot

“I am writing this because they cannot.”

— Jill Talbot

Nick Flynn is another writer I admire - his fragmented sections, his playfulness with genre, his urgency. The palette in his work…

— Jill Talbot

“There are so many of us out there, trying to turn Spyrograph flowers into rocket ships.”

— Jill Talbot