From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls and

One of the most valuable spaces for an artist is the inner life-the sacred place where, outside of the constraints of time and space, meaning is extracted from raw experience and fashioned into art. In this timely new essay, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo discusses the work writers do as they sift through experience and work to cultivate rich interior lives. For authors, this often involves performing triage, a constant assessment of events that helps determine what's useful for a story and potentially enduring.

But what is at stake when we perform triage? Is an artist's interior life an act of generosity or selfishness?

Reflecting on a year of reading and meditations on the nature of interiority brought up by a global pandemic and orders to stay at-home, Triage is a candid and arresting look at the process that goes into creative work, by one of our most celebrated and bestselling novelists.

A Vintage Shorts Nonfiction Original