Usually, I don’t write because I believe I have something urgent to say, I discover I have something to say because of the urgency with which it wells up when I write.

I am interested in the material impact of narrative, whether construed from fact or fiction. I do believe narratives leave a trace, either psychological or metaphysical, and for that reason, I think it’s as important to invent stories as it is to uncover them. Fact and fiction can both serve those in power and those who are not. The power to tell stories resides within everyone.

I love that space between one fragment of a text and another, where my mind is racing to figure out what is happening or what I should understand or feel. That is an incredibly rich moment, in which I am hyper-alert and flooded with possibilities.

It’s like one group of people has decided, in their own minds, that another group of people has all these terrible qualities. It’s almost like it parallels the idea of a witch hunt. Somebody who is for all intents and purposes is stigmatized by an entire community, with completely imaginary charges. That’s how racism seems to work.

As we begin 2015, our recommenders are heading into the wilderness.

I went to buy the Roland Juno-6 with my best friend Michael the summer I was sixteen, before either one of us had a driver’s license. Other boys saved their house-painting money and bought an electric guitar with a starter amp. Or a five-piece drum kit, if they had the kind of parents who tolerated an unholy racket in the basement. Michael and I had earned eight dollars an hour for two weeks to stain a cottage on the Cape, a mythic payday that had sent us whooping and hollering into the waves, and I wanted to buy a synthesizer with my share of the windfall.

MASHA HAMILTON | Part of what keeps me interested in fiction is to write to find out the end myself.

SHAWN VESTAL | Remembering something is not all that different from inventing it.

LESLIE ULLMAN | This is how others’ poems have affected me — through the action of their images, their minds’ eyes superimposed on my own.

NICOLA WALDRON | Your forebears hand down land — something of both use and beauty. A place to live.