Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now

This book of practical writing and publishing advice celebrates the creative, community-building pleasures of humanist expertise.

Humanities experts today are embattled. In a world of crises undermining higher education at every turn, what can still motivate humanists to write? Galvanizing, imaginative, and unrepentantly nerdy, Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feeling offers practical writing and publishing advice alongside a forcefully affirmative account of why humanities writing matters.

Mesle proposes that writing can help envision sustainable community, but only when we recognize that humanist authority comes from both our reasons and our feelings. Alongside everyday compositional advice--including strategies for addressing different audiences, pitching publications, and managing writing anxiety--readers will find an account of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how university-trained writers at all levels benefit from embracing a broader range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing’s community-building potential and makes them better able to value their own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues, or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche, weird, or beloved, objects of study.

Reasons and Feelings draws on Mesle’s expertise as a professor of writing and her work as an editor helping academics shift between writing for scholarly venues and journalistic ones. In a voice that’s honest, warm, accessible, and bracingly funny, Reasons and Feelings gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds their writing can make.

Sarah Mesle is associate professor in the writing program at the University of Southern California. She is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she was formerly senior humanities editor. Mesle is also the founding coeditor of the LARB channel Avidly and the short books series Avidly Reads. Her writing has also appeared in venues ranging from Studies in American Fiction to InStyle to The New York Times Magazine.