Last May, TW founder Martha Nichols spoke with Laura Hartenberger, author of the definitive 2023 essay “What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing” in Noema. Laura, who’s a lecturer in the Writing Programs at University of California at Los Angeles, is an essayist and fiction writer herself. When she spoke with Martha, they were both finishing up a turbulent spring semester that included protests for and against Israel at UCLA and Harvard. Here they confront big ethical questions surrounding AI and writing instruction. Are bots helpful tools for students or just another way of cheating? How and when should such tools be part of writing assignments? What qualities of voice and meaningful exposition are missing from chatbot writing? Can AI-generated work emotionally move readers?

TW’s Neva Talladen talks to writer Naomi Cohn about her book The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight and the reclamation of self it explores for her as a legally blind person. A 2023 McKnight Artist Fellow in Writing, her previous publications include a chapbook, Between Nectar & Eternity (Red Dragon-fly Press, 2013), and pieces in Baltimore Review, Fourth River, Hippocampus, Terrain, and Poetry, among others. Naomi has also appeared on NPR and been honored by a Best of the Net Finalist and two Pushcart nominations.

TW’s Neva Talladen talks to author Jianna Heuer about blown-up whale parts, opening a bookstore during the 2020 pandemic, and writing a revenge novel as catharsis. Her creative nonfiction and personal essays have been published in The Inquisitive Eater, Midsummer Dream House, Across The Margin, and other literary journals. Her flash non-fiction has appeared in two books, Fast Funny Women and Fast Fierce Women.