10 Things I Learned About Writing from The Yale Review Festival

Listening in on other artists talk about making things might be my favorite activity.

This week, The Yale Review hosted an ambitious version of the festival I launched back in 2020: a gathering designed to bring the page to life—to see what happens when writers and readers meet, and when we talk about making art together. is not just read, but heard, questioned, metabolized in real time. We invited poets, novelists, essayists, translators, and editors. We held workshops and panels, readings and conversations. We thought out loud.

The audience getting ready for Ocean Vuong’s workshop.

In this moment of fracture and flux, I thought a lot about why we gather like this—what it means to hold a festival dedicated to literature and ideas. At The Yale Review, we often describe the magazine as a site for the social practice of thought: a space for co-creation rather than gatekeeping, a space where we reach toward clarity rather than settle for easy answers. In a world where language is often weaponized or emptied out, the work of the artist and thinker is to cut through that fog, to see with precision and depth, to reshape our perceptions with rigor and care. As someone reminded us at last week’s conference at Yale on John Ashbery, Emerson once wrote, “Experience is what we attend to.” What I saw this past week was a number of artists and thinkers—musicians, historians, poets, novelists, and more—attend closely to experience.

After all, the task of the artist is to attend—to look at what’s really there (the things we don’t want to see), and to see past reality’s disguises. Art doesn’t simply console or reassure; it unsettles, it sharpens our awareness, it forces us to confront the complexities and contradictions of being human. It challenges us to look beyond the familiar, to enter imaginative and moral terrains where our habits of thought are tested and transformed.

The theme of this year’s festival was collaboration: a practice that asks us to work with rather than against, to encounter difference without flattening it into sameness. Collaboration requires not just willingness but vulnerability, a capacity to listen without immediately responding, to labor together without knowing the outcome. In this way, it mirrors the creative process itself, which is often a kind of open-ended negotiation with the unknown, intensified by the frisson of contact.

What follows is less a report than a list of provisional observations, shaped by the pleasure and dissonance of sharing language across difference—a kind of collaboration.