Contributor
Phillip Lopate
Phillip Lopate's nonfiction books include essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body); film criticism (Totally Tenderly Tragically); an urbanist meditation (Waterfront); and, most recently, Notes on Sontag. He has also edited The Art of the Personal Essay and American Movie Critics. He is a professor in the graduate writing and film divisions of Columbia University.
Recent Writing
The Writer as Curmudgeon
The essay feasts on doubt, self-doubt, contradiction and paradox. Nowhere is this more striking than in essays written in opposition to a seemingly unchallengeable good. Examples of the tradition include Joyce Carol Oates’ “Against Nature,” Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” Witold Gombrowicz’s “AgainstPoets,” Laura Kipnis’ “Against Love” and (dare I include) my own “Against Joie de Vivre.”Issue 39
Research and Personal Writing
Those drawn to the writing of personal essays and memoirs may eventually discover the need to do some research.Issue 43
Nonfiction may be a construct, but does that make it fiction?
Issue 42
The essay: exploration or argument? (Or, perhaps, both?)
Recently, I have been rethinking one of my basic positions regarding the essay. For years, I have been saying the essay is not a logical proof or legal brief: It does not have to persuade; what is important is to follow one’s thoughts, even if they lead to contradiction.Issue 41
The ethics of writing about other people
Whenever I speak in public about autobiographical nonfiction or simply give a reading of my own work, I am invariably asked in the Q-and-A session: How should one deal with writing about one’s family members or intimates?Issue 40
Imagination in nonfiction
In these innovative if confusing times, when talk of hybrid forms and genre blending abounds, the temptation for nonfiction writers to make their works as novelistic as possible is huge. Since fiction still enjoys greater literary cachet and status than nonfiction, the temptation is understandable.Issue 38
Best of Times, Worst of Times
Looking back at publishing history to the year 2025, we can see it as a particularly exciting transitional period for our industry. To quote the English novelist Charles Dickens, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”Issue 31
The Story of My Father
Old age is a great leveler: The frailer elderly all come to resemble turtles trapped in curved shells, shrinking, wrinkled and immobile, so that, in a roomful, a terrarium of the old, it is hard to disentangle one solitary individuals karma from the mass fate of aging.Issue 08 / Connecting / Connecting
