Jill Talbot

Empathy for the Younger Self | March 21 - April 11, 2026 | 11 AM-1 PM CST — JILL TALBOT A four-week course inspired by Didion's advice to "keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be." Reading and writing with one meeting a week.

Beginning March 21! #writingclass #personalessays #amwriting #literarynonfiction Read beautiful essays, join a supportive group of #womenwriters, write & receive supportive, thorough feedback (weekly) from me. jilltalbot.net/register/p/e...

The Heart Folds Early - Nebraska Press This book is about what it means to make a choice. As mothers, how do we carry life and death in our bodies and survive with our hearts intact?The Heart Fold...

One of my favorite essayists @jillchristman.bsky.social has a new memoir out Tuesday. @univnebpress.bsky.social Pre-order here: www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/978...

The Very First Video Game Was Just a Box in the Corner of a Bar A revolution was televised in 1972. It cost beer drinkers 25¢ a play. After work, thirsty folks rambled into Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, CA to knock back frothy, cool mugs and test their skill…

"[T]he new company needed a game so simple that even drunks could play it." @lithub.com.web.brid.gy lithub.com/the-very-fir... I remember playing (sober and six) the home version for the first time at a friend's house after school. Mesmerized. #1970s

Learn & practice how to describe people (and yourself) in your nonfiction to create vivid, memorable characterizations. #amwriting #writingclass #personalessay #writingcraft jilltalbot.net/register/p/e...

"I bought some yard art: a small plastic-resin fox statue. I like to move him around our front yard every few days—"—Steven Church @riverteeth.bsky.social Beautiful Things #essay

riverteethjournal.com/beautiful-th...

Whose Journey? On the Travel Writing of Displacement Travel—and the writing that seeks to capture it—is inherently generative. Travelers use movement through space to explore personal identity and social norms. Then, by organizing those explorations …

"[M]emoirists reveal how movement—crossing borders, traversing cities, changing addresses—was fundamental to the process of reinventing their identities and their life circumstances." Kimberley Kinder @lithub.com.web.brid.gy lithub.com/whose-journe...

Reading at Random with Virginia Woolf by Frances Lindemann February 18, 2026 – In Woolf’s final, unfinished manuscript, she employs a “methodology of disorder” that enables “that state of mind in which it seems possible to us to write the book, not to read it...

"Recognition relies on something that already exists, and this is Woolf’s ideal of writing: it calls forth what already exists, but is not yet known, in the reader." — Frances Lindemann @theparisreivew.bsky.social www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/02...

gravel road with text: Upcoming Stops on the Writing Road: Virtual Seminars with Jill Talbot

Roadside motel office photo with text: How To Begin (Your Essays)/Check In February 5/11:00 AM

Restaurant at night photo with text: How To Close (Your Essays)/Live, February 10, 11 AM-1 PM

I'm teaching #writingcraft in the personal essay! Reading packet included with each seminar & #writingprompts Questions? Reply or DM!

***25% OFF for all first time registrants***

Flyer: Virtual Writing Courses 1) Trending Forms & Points of View February 7-March 14 2) Empathy for the Younger Self March 21-April 11 Instructor: Jill Talbot Photos: typewriter and a young Joan Didion

NEW writing courses in the essay open for registration! Info here: jilltalbot.net/seminars

#writing #nonfiction #amwriting #literarynonfiction #womenwriters #essays #writersky #writingcraft #writingclass

Losing My Southern Accent and Searching for a Link to My Past The most beautiful accent in the world belonged to my grandmother. Pat was born in 1933 in Thomasville, North Carolina, a town once famous for its furniture industry and now largely unknown. She us…

"[My accent] does appear, however fleetingly, and without my permission." I so get this essay by Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza @lithub.com.web.brid.gy People tell me they hear the Texas in my voice when I talk on the phone or after I've had a glass or two of wine. lithub.com/losing-my-so...

Flyer: "I"dentity: Crafting Persona in the Essay Jill Talbot Wednesday, December 10th, 2025 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM EST (with photo of Talbot)

“I could spend hours trying to write [my childhood home] as it should be written . . . I should only succeed if I had begun by describing Virginia herself." — Virginia Woolf

Join me December 10th (7-9 Eastern) to discuss persona in the personal essay/memoir. writingworkshops.com/products/ide...

100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 The idea of 100 Notable Small Press Books was born November 2024, after The New York Times’s annual 100 Notable Books list featured eighty-two books from the Big Five publishing houses (Pengu…

Great list here! @literaryhub.bsky.social lithub.com/100-notable-...

Photo of a Nine-Year-Old Girl Smoking by Kat Moore - CRAFT Inspired from a photo by Mary Ellen Mark Lisa’s sitting in the baby pool with chubby Annie even though they aren’t babies anymore. The plastic green pool is in the driveway of Annie’s Aunt Jean’s hous...

www.craftliterary.com/2019/12/13/p...

Staring at the Silence | Jill Talbot - Sonora Review Stepping through the back door, I squint against the shadows before sliding into the corner booth of the bar section. The restaurant’s near empty, the way I like it. Every few weeks, I drive the seven...

Thanks to @sonorareview.bsky.social for publishing my essay. sonorareview.com/2025/11/04/s...

Postcards from Virginia Woolf by Sarah Bochicchio November 7, 2025 – "Woolf likely imagined these cards would end up in a garbage can or, at best, someone’s attic."

"The postcards materialize an unselfconscious act, a persona not quite public, a version of herself meant to be seen by one other person for a fleeting moment." — Sarah Bochicchio @theparisreivew.bsky.social www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/11...

To the Boy on the Night Bus — Off Assignment “You could’ve been five or twelve, for all I knew. I’m not good with children; I haven’t been around them often, never witnessed or memorized the milestones that my friends my age seem to carry like i...

"What is it about the steady movement of a vehicle—a bus, a plane, a boat, a train—that makes every possible life I could live spill out in front of me?" — Maggie Hart

Love the setting & details & rumination in this essay. @offassignment.bsky.social

www.offassignment.com/articles/mag...

All Our Leavings by Jill Talbot November 1, 2019 – Jill Talbot’s first essay in a year-long series on her daughter leaving home.

Six Novembers ago (!!), the first essay in my year-long @theparisreivew.bsky.social column ran, followed by 17 more essays across the four seasons about me & my daughter in the year before she left for college—leading to the day I drove away from her dorm. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/11...

What’s Real and What’s Not: Gish Jen on Writing Between the Factual Lines In his poem, “Epilogue,” Robert Lowell rues the difficulty of making “something imagined/not recalled.” Famously autobiographical, he laments that sometimes everything I write with the threadbare a…

"I, likewise, have invented scenes that occurred long before my birth. I have filled in gaps in the record, 'remembered' things I could not remember, and here and there written what I liked for the sheer fun of writing it." — Gish Jen @lithub.com.web.brid.gy lithub.com/whats-real-a...

"Sometimes, we learn the meaning of words and it has nothing to do with dictionaries; the kinds of meanings we learn because we must live them."

"[H]e has become a shoebox of letters in the closet, on a shelf too high for me reach." — Allison Albino The Missouri Review

missourireview.com/albino/

Fay Sachpatzidis: Root Lady Fay Sachpatzidis is a writer and poet based in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Normal School, and Bodega Magazine, among other places.

"As we drove on, the miles slipping away beneath us, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were things that lived in the spaces between what my mother told me and what she kept hidden." —Fay Sachpatzidis @baltimorereview.bsky.social
A fascinating essay baltimorereview.org/summer_2025/...

Katie Kitamura's Object of Desire A flea-market find unlocks something unexpected for the novelist.

"As it turns out, I prefer the doorknobs as useless objects, tucked into the back corner of a closet. I suppose at some point they’ll no longer speak to me, and I’ll set them out on the stoop for someone else to take." — Katie Kitamura @yalereview.bsky.social yalereview.org/article/kati...

So wonderful to read your writing again! I have missed it (well, new writing—I always return to your essays.)

The Art of the Impersonal Essay, by Zadie Smith In my experience, every kind of writing requires some kind of self-soothing Jedi mind trick, and, when it comes to essay composition, the rectangle is mine.

“I just want to think out loud about the things that matter most to me.” @zadiesmith.bsky.social @newyorker.com www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

"In elementary school art class, we studied the color wheel and contour lines and Vincent van Gogh, which is perhaps where I got the idea that mental illness is a prerequisite of being a successful artist." New @gabemontesanti.bsky.social Essay Alert! @anmlymag.bsky.social anmly.org/ap40/gabe-mo...

Copy of Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader on a table

Back cover with blurbs by Paul Lisicky, Sonja Livingston, and Jill Christman with Silverman author photo

Sue William Silverman's latest essay collection: Amazing. I knew it would be when I saw glowing blurbs by other amazing essayists: @paullisicky.bsky.social @jillchristman.bsky.social & Sonja Livingston. @univnebpress.bsky.social

Greyhound: A Memoir A Memoir

bookshop.org/p/books/grey...

Copy of Greyhound: A Memoir with vintage motel sign on cover

“Away from anything and everything familiar, I was where I wanted to be.” — Joanna Pocock gives us an immersive road narrative in conversation with other writers of the road, views from her past & present self, environmental geography & a celebration of the roadside motel. #ontheroad

Cover of So Heavy a Weight: Creative Writers on Women’s Reproductive Health featuring flowers in bloom or not

Moved & proud to be a part of this anthology with a collaborative essay with Marcia Aldrich along with an impressive list of contributors. With thanks to an extraordinary editor, Stephanie Vessely. Pre-order here: www.fulcrumbooks.com/product-page...

Copy of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir (red balloon on cover)

Published 10 years ago today! softskull.com/books/the-wa... #memoir #books #singlemother #memoirinessays #motherdaughter #roadnarrative #home

Mogan's The world is your oyster house

My friend, Liane Malinowski, has a wonderful guest essay in Jack Christian’s charming #Substack, Day Dates. I recommend both. open.substack.com/pub/daydates...