When I first discovered Jeanette Winterson, I was struck by the incredible presence of her work; not only her ability to convey the tender, insular reality of love and conflict, but by the way her prose seemed to carry its own life force. Winterson doesn’t shy away from discomfort, from the turbulent landscape of her Pentecostal upbringing and disapproving family, from the question once asked of her: “Why be happy when you could be normal” (which later became the title of Winterson’s wonderfully moving 2011 memoir). 

Winterson’s writing is visceral, embodied, and patiently political, capturing the reality of growing up queer in an environment built upon suppression. In spite—or perhaps in response—Winterson’s work transmutes an irreverent, unbridled joy, even amidst the inevitable sorrow and grief that comes with a human life. Her most recent book, One Aladdin Two Lamps, shatters and reassembles Shahrazad’s One Thousand and One Nights, asking ancient questions that feel both timeless and critically important to our contemporary world.

With forty years of writing and publishing experience under her belt, I was thrilled at the opportunity to speak with Jeanette about her routines and insights on the writing life, and all the more charmed by her passion, humor, and recognition of writing’s essential role, now more than ever.

– Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas
Editorial Intern

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1. What book should everyone read growing up?

Jeanette Winterson: Everyone should read Wuthering Heights, especially before Emerald Fennell’s adaptation comes out on Valentine’s Day next year. I think she’s butchered it. So read the original, then you can watch the movie, and then you can say, Jeanette Winterson knows jack shit.

• EL: Did you see a screening? Or is this just an inkling you have?
  
• JW: I’ve been following it closely. I love the costumes—Margot Robbie in red latex does it for me—and I love adaptations, but sometimes as a writer who cares about text and language and all of that stuff, you do die inside. With a movie, you get great sets, wonderful actors; you get the story, but you don’t get the language.

2. Write alone or in community?

JW: Write by yourself. Oh, absolutely. All writing is about discomfort. It’s a lie detector that starts with yourself. If you’re always chatting to somebody else, you don’t get that discomfort and you don’t do the work of the lie detector on what you’re writing. 

• EL: I’m inclined to agree.
  
• JW: If you’re doing a script or something which starts out as collaborative, a hundred percent. I’m working on a musical at the moment, and that’s really collaborative and I love it. But that’s because it fits the form. 

3. How do you start from scratch? 

JW: You don’t do it by going into the executive suite and trying to force an idea. It’s not office work, it’s not factory work. You have to work with your unconscious, with your inner self and let ideas bubble up, let images come forward, even images without words, pictures in your mind. Follow them with grace and humility. What I see with my students is a kind of terror—they close everything down and format it way too early on. That’s what I mean about discomfort. Let the thing develop. Let it play with you. And don’t tell it what it is all the time. Wait to see.

4. Three presses you’ll read anything from?

JW: Grove Press, of course. Melville House for the little editions and the essays that they do. I love those. And in Britain, Faber and Faber.

5. Hardcover, paperback, or e-reader?

JW: I always buy new books in hardcover if they exist like that because I can afford it. Somebody’s got to do it to support the industry and it’s a pleasure for me. I don’t want it on e-reader, not least because we all know that they can disappear your books any time they want.

•  EL: I don’t like not knowing how many pages I have left to go.
  
• JW: Oh, I don’t mind that. That’s interesting. But I still think there’s some perfect forms that haven’t been bettered. It is the progress fallacy. So an egg is a perfect form. An apple is a perfect form. You can’t better them. And for me, a book is a perfect form. It’s not waiting to be updated to an e-reader because some tech nerd who does everything on Blinkist thinks it’s a good idea.

6. If you were a novel, what novel would you be?

JW: I don’t want to be a novel because it’s too big a possibility. I might end up as a 19th century three volume novel, and that would be upsetting because I’d be too long, or I might end up as post-structuralist fiction. What would I be? I think I’d rather be a poem because a poem is contained, it’s pressurized, every word counts, and it’s short. It is amazing to me and kind of glorious that poetry, which everybody thought was the ultimate outdated form, has made such a comeback because it’s short and nobody’s got any attention span anymore. Never say it’s over ‘til it’s over. 

7. Describe your ideal writing day.

JW: Oh God, listen, when you’ve been doing it for 40 years, there is no such thing anymore. And that’s kind of great. When I am working, I don’t do anything outside of it. I don’t do events, I don’t do public stuff, which I do a lot of normally. So it’s just me in the country. I get up early, really early. I used to be a night owl, but now that I’m old I’m not. Walk the dog, chop the wood, light the fire, and do a couple of hours. Above all, keep your emails off, keep your Wi-Fi off. Don’t even think about it. When I’m doing real work, I never, ever switch the Wi-fi on until I’ve done the real work. Because it’s just a tsunami of interruptions, isn’t it? You have to deliberately interrupt the interruptions.

8. Typing or longhand?

JW: Never longhand, never did. When I started out, it was a typewriter and that made you look like Kermit or any of the other Muppets. You just sit there bashing it out. I love that because it gives a distance. I’ve never been somebody who carries around a notebook and writes down my thoughts, mostly because they’re garbage. It’s when I sit down and work that good things happen.

9. What’s a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?

JW: I don’t know. I never look at writing advice. I’m a writer. I can do it. Jesus. I’ve been doing this for 40 years. If I need advice now, you shouldn’t be talking to me.

10. What’s a piece of writing advice you think everyone needs to hear? 

JW: The main thing is turn up for work. Just make a pact with yourself on what time you can reasonably spend doing your work. Don’t do magical thinking, but when you’ve made the deal with yourself, stick to it. 

11. Realism or Surrealism?

JW: Oh, God, I hate realism. I’ve never written social realism in my life, and I never will. It’s only a partial truth about who we are. I’ve spent all of my time begging people not to get lost in the literal. Without imagination, we’re nothing. 

12. What’s your favorite comfort snack for writing? 

JW: Salted peanuts. I mean, fortunately, I also have great self-discipline, so I’m not mainlining peanuts, but I do like to have a bowl of them. Probably towards the end, when I feel that I’m in the last hour, which is a feeling thing, then the nuts come out as a kind of reward.

13. Edit as you go or shitty first draft?

JW: Neither. Neither. Every book is different. Again we’re going for these formulae prescriptions that don’t work. You take each piece of work on its own merits in its own right and you give it what it needs. One piece of work might need endless going back over for whatever reason. Another piece of work might just come flying out and you don’t know why as a kind of act of grace. 

14. How did you meet your agent?

JW: Oh, well, I’ve had more than one. You’re looking at a long life. My current agent, who’s been my agent for a long time, is Caroline Michelle at P.F.D. in the UK. I met her in 1978 when she was my publicist on The Passion. Now she runs a huge business. We sometimes look at each other and say, you know, we’ve known each other for 38 years. One of the beautiful things about getting older is that, especially if you’re a woman, you know, there are those women who stay with you and really become a kind of living diary of who you are and what you’ve done over all these years. It’s an incredible thing. And it’s something I really value about getting old. I look around and I see these amazing women like Elizabeth Schmitz at Grove, who I’ve known forever and we’re still here, girls!

15. What is your best advice for pushing through writer’s block?

JW: Never had it. It’s a con job. Really, any problem is your friend. It is not a difficulty. If you’re stuck, you need to work out why, because either it’s in your life or it’s in the work. Your unconscious, your creative self is trying to flag something to you and you have to dive deeper and go sideways and find out what’s going on. It might be in your life, it might be that you really need to take a break, or it might be in the work and you’re swerving something or trying to impose something on it. 

16. What other art forms and literary genres inspire you?

JW: I love music, and particularly classical music and opera, because it’s so ludicrous. What a ridiculous art form to invent, all those people running around on stage. I love it because it’s this sense of humans at their most gloriously ridiculous. I think with art forms, you look at them and it reminds us that we can do so much more than seeking money and power and land grab and status and starting wars and blowing up the world. Now, whenever I see any art form, it doesn’t matter what it is, I just think this is the best of us. With the way the news works, we’re surrounded all the time with the worst of humans. And that can really get you down. We’ve got to remember that we need nourishment. It’s not elitist, it’s not a luxury item. I would urge anyone to do that every day. Working every day on your deathless prose doesn’t matter, but getting nourishment from somebody else every day, even if it’s just five minutes with a poem in the morning. That matters.

17. Book club or writing group?

JW: Almighty, I’d rather clean out the cesspit without gloves if that answers your question. I’ve already told you about writing groups. And book clubs, no. I can read. I know how to read on my own. 

18. Who was the writer who made you want to write? 

JW: It didn’t happen like that. I didn’t have an ordinary beginning in life. And the only book I had for a long time was the Bible. So that’s how I learnt to write. If anybody wants to know more, read Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal. And then all questions will be answered.

19. How do you know when you’ve reached the end of a project?

JW: I think it’s completely obvious. When people say things like that I just think if you’re a writer and you don’t know when it’s the end, you should go and do another job. I am absolutely ruthless about this. By the time you’re well over the halfway mark, which is a different place for everybody, you really should be feeling the momentum of what you’ve done. That applies to a short story as much as it does to long-form fiction. It’s a co-creator with you. You have to let it do its job.If you come to it with humility and you listen, you get the feedback from the work itself.

20. What was the last indie bookstore you went to?

JW: I’ve just been in Bulgaria, and visited an indie bookstore there, but nobody will know about that one. I’m going to cheat and say that the best thing you can do when you’re traveling to a new place is immediately find out where the closest bookstore is, because it’s likely to be independent. And go there and buy a book. You don’t have to announce yourself as a writer if you are one. You just go there, and you support the local bookshop, and I think that really makes a difference.

21. What’s an activity you do when you need to take a writing break? 

JW: I live in the country, so I can always just take a walk, which is great. I have to grow my own vegetables here and chop wood and keep the fires going and walk the dogs and so on. I don’t live a city life. In the summer things have to be watered, crops have to be planted, so on and so forth. So it’s a life that works very well for me because it’s art and nature and they do go really well together.

22. What does evolving as a writer mean to you?

JW: All you do is write each book, each set of stories, each non-fiction work, whatever it is that’s bugging you at the time, and that’s what you do. There’s no career progression. There’s just each piece of work as it turns up.

23. Outside of literature, what are you obsessed with?

Jeanette Winterson I’m obsessed with the state of the world at the moment. I believe that where we are now, politically, is a failure of imagination. It’s the 21st century and all we can think of to do is kill each other and trash the planet. The reason I’m always going around and doing my public-facing work and saying to people, “Look, you have to respect and nourish your imaginative capacity” is because what fiction does best of all is to take a situation and ask what if. It’s a way of refusing to be crushed by gravity, by the state of things. The way that we live isn’t a law like gravity. It’s not something that you’re subject to, whether you like it or not. This is a story we’re telling. And we could tell a better story. Anybody who tells stories for a living knows that you don’t have to have an ending you don’t want. 

The post Jeanette Winterson Thinks Writer’s Block Is a Con Job appeared first on Electric Literature.

This week, the Cercador Prize announced Christina MacSweeney as the winner of the 2025 prize for her translation of Jazmina Barrera’s The Queen of Swords, out from Two Lines Press.

This is the third year of the Cercador Prize, which has further solidified itself as one of my favorite small prizes going because of its dual intentions: it is a monetary prize given to translators, and it is a prize judged entirely by independent booksellers. There’s no formal submission process, but instead the annual jury of booksellers put forth a shortlist and eventually determine the nominee based entirely on their own reading habits—so the prize is also not limited to any particular genre, but instead is open to everything from fiction to memoir to hybrid prose to poetry and beyond.

The jury had this to say about the book and its translation:

The Queen of Swords, presented here in a lyrical translation by Christina MacSweeney, astounded the committee. Jazmina Barrera’s study on Elena Garro, a maligned pioneer of magical realism, defies convention and embraces contradiction. This is a book of reversals and research, an unwaveringly brilliant portrait of a complex and undone life, captured in art and destruction, love and pain, faith and persecution.

MacSweeney, of course, is one of the preeminent translators working today. She has translated works by such authors as Elvira Navarro, Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Julián Herbert, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to several anthologies of Latin American literature. In recent years, her translation of Jazmina Barrera’s Cross-Stitch was shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Institute Translation Prize, Elvira Navarro’s Rabbit Island was longlisted for a National Book Award, and Clyo Mendoza’s Fury was shortlisted for the Valle Inclán Translation Prize. Jazmina Barrera is the author of six books in Spanish. The Queen of Swords is her fourth book translated by Christina MacSweeney and published by Two Lines Press, including Linea Nigra, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Autobiography Prize. She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope.

This year’s Cercador jury included Javi Tapia of Third Place Books (Seattle, WA), Dylan McGonigle of Wayfinder Bookshop (Fairfax, CA), Beatriz Quiroz García of Skylight Books (Los Angeles, CA), C. Rees of Alienated Majesty Books (Austin, TX), and prize chair Emily Tarr of Thank You Books (Birmingham, AL).

Bud Smith is the author of the novel Teenager and the story collection Double Bird, among other books. Mighty, a novel, is forthcoming from Knopf in spring 2027. His story “Skyhawks” appears in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review.

When Krystal Martin started surveying her neighbors in the southwest Mississippi town of Gloster about the impact of a local wood pellet manufacturing facility, she was focused on air quality. The facility has been fined multiple times for exceeding emissions limits, and Martin was worried about her neighbors’ health. From respiratory issues to eye and skin irritation, just about everyone in the town of almost 900 people felt some impact.

But air quality wasn’t the only concern. “You hear some people talk about the dust,” Martin says. “Some people said they were impacted by a lot of sound.” 

Noise is just a part of life there, she says. Loud 18-wheeler trucks drive along the country roads every couple minutes. Machinery and loudspeakers echo out from the plant across the two-mile-wide town. But it wasn’t until Martin’s organization, the Greater Greener Gloster Project, partnered with Brown University epidemiological researcher Erica Walker that Martin began to understand the constant cacophony not just as an annoyance, but as another factor contributing to residents’ health.

“We knew it was a problem. People talked about it being a problem,” says Martin. “But we didn’t know it was noise pollution.”

Walker leads the Community Noise Lab, a research initiative that explores the intersections between noise and health. The connection between loud sounds and health extends far beyond hearing loss. Research is finding noise exposure has  implications for cardiovascular and cognitive health. Yet, unlike other environmental stressors, noise has not been a major factor in community planning.

Research efforts like Walker’s are deepening our understanding of how noise permeates lives, arming communities with information to better plan for their health and their future. 

“I want to empower citizens to be able to negotiate what comes into their communities, and negotiate thinking about noise as one of those things,” Walker says.

Sound plays a central role in how humans interact with the world, explains Walker. From a young age, kids learn about the importance of hearing as one of the five senses.  

“We’ve legislated, regulated, discussed all of these other senses, but noise is the one that we kind of left out,” says Walker.

Now, research is showing just how grave exposure to noise can be. Noise can trigger a stress response, the same system that signals when our bodies are in danger. It has been linked to issues like hypertension, heightened risk of heart disease and impaired cognitive functioning. It can cause sleep issues and contribute to mental health conditions like anxiety and depression.

There’s a history, Walker notes, of “putting loud things” like highways, airports and industrial facilities “in communities that don’t have the power to fight back.” People of color and lower-income communities tend to be at highest risk. 

While the health consequences of noise are becoming clearer, understanding of just how much noise is in people’s lives and communities remains hazy.

In the European Union, a leader in recognizing noise as a health threat, member countries have mapped sound from roadways, rail traffic, airports and industry. Awareness in the US is lagging, according to University of Michigan professor of environmental health sciences Rick Neitzel. The US has two main national resources — one from the federal Department of Transportation tracking transportation noise, the other from the National Park Service. However, there aren’t good resources tracking noise exposure in other aspects of daily life.

But Neitzel sees awareness growing.

“I think people are starting to wake up and realize this isn’t just a nuisance,” says Neitzel. “It’s not just a necessary byproduct of modern life. It’s actually bad for us.”

In Gloster, high school and community college students regularly reposition air quality and noise monitors around town. 

They’re helping collect data as part of Walker’s ongoing research on the health effects of wood pellet manufacturing. The industry exploded in the US South to accommodate EU demand for fossil fuel alternatives, and has particularly impacted majority-Black, low-income communities.

Walker approaches noise as interconnected with other environmental factors, like air and water quality. Instead of prioritizing noise over the concerns of locals, Walker monitors a range of factors, including sound. Ultimately, research leaves residents with a package of data that can inform their planning and negotiations.

That set of data can spur change, as Walker saw in Boston. Neighbors of Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox, were rattled by concerts the stadium hosted in the off-season. When Walker collected data around the neighborhood, she not only found very high decibels of noise during concerts, but also low-frequency reverberations that particularly impacted closest neighbors.

Initially, interactions with Fenway Park were contentious, she recalls. But, over time, the venue became more receptive to the community’s concerns. The park invested in its own noise monitoring equipment, she says, and has continued to use her metrics to collect data.

“They see the importance of that, and the community really appreciates being heard,” Walker says. 

In Gloster, Mississippi, Walker’s study found that noise levels were up to 10 decibels higher, or twice as loud, as a similar community without a biomass plant. Simply having this data available gives residents more power to negotiate terms of operations with industries, she explains: “A lot of the noise issues we have in our country have been uninformed planning, uninformed responses to things.”

“You can take everything that I’ve done with this and say, ‘No, we still want the plant,’” Walker says. “I’m happy because that’s an informed response.”

While awareness of the connections between health and noise is rising, there’s no one, straightforward path to address the problem. 

Responses to noise tend to be enacted at the local or municipal level, explains Neitzel. Paris has sought to crack down on traffic noise with radars that pinpoint excessively loud vehicles, issuing fines to offenders. Though Neitzel isn’t aware of research on the technology, he says intuitively it makes sense that reducing loud cars will help. 

Several European cities have lowered speed limits, leading to reduced traffic noise. When Zurich reduced speed on some streets from 50 kilometers per hour to 30 kilometers per hour (about 30 to 19 miles per hour), noise levels dropped, and residents self-reported less annoyance and sleep disturbance.  

One change under way, Neitzel says, is the expanding fleet of electric vehicles, which he says are quieter than combustion engines in slow, urban environments. Another approach to highway noise is roadside barriers, which can reduce noise by up to 10 decibels.  

Ultimately, Neitzel sees systemic approaches to planning as most likely to make a lasting impact, like expanding public transit and reducing vehicles on the road. He points to congestion pricing, an approach to curbing traffic and air pollution in cities by charging drivers at busy times of day. Cities that have enacted it also see traffic noise levels drop.

“It’s not like the city is going to get quieter overnight,” Neitzel says, “but I think those things have a much bigger chance of making a bigger impact over the long haul.” 

For Walker, community involvement is the key to improving noise pollution. Addressing noise in a way that is equitable is a challenge. Within communities, noise complaints are sometimes wielded to target aspects of a neighborhood seen as “undesirable.” 

“Noise can be a power thing,” she says. “It could be used to silence people, silence practices, silence the acoustical culture of a community.”

In Gloster, the din of the wood pellet facility can still be heard around the clock. “It’s mentally draining,” says Martin. “It’s mentally stressful.”

But now, Martin says, the community recognizes noise as a health factor along with the other air and water quality concerns. Armed with data showing the extent of the problem, she believes Gloster residents are well-positioned to push to curb the cacophony.

“The people in the community, we should not hear that 24 hours, seven days a week,” says Martin. “Maybe we can now influence policies.”

The post The Curative Power of Quieter Cities appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

After a year of quiet labour, we are launching our new image-forward PDR sister-site!

Pulsating blood vessels push fluid into and out of the brains of slumbering mice