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Real True Stories (And How They Happen) The Delacorte Review is the narrative nonfiction publication of the Columbia Journalism School.

New stories appear every month at www.delacortereview.org, and in print four times a year. Its weekly newsletter, Writerland, https://thedelacortereview.substack.com/, is a guide to finding joy in the often difficult work of writing. At the core of The Review's mission is discovery -- of new writers, new voices, new stories, and new readers. We believe that the most powerful stories are the ones writers need to tell. Our commitment is to be home for those stories, and for those writers.

06/19/2026

What does sporting joy inspire us to write? What does joy compel us to say?
Plenty. The spirit of such moments and the prose it inspires remind us all how wonderful writing can be when it comes from a full and happy heart.

I cannot help myself; one more chapter before the break.

06/16/2026

We each seek even as we embrace creative risk. These two impulses are, however, often incompatible. The first can subordinate you to authority. The second says, in effect, that you do not care what others think.

is a far lonelier endeavor, where the risks are your own to take. It is all well and good to say we do not care what others think. But that is seldom the case. Writing in particular forces us to be public with our work, and we hope it will be approved of. Or, if you will, validated.

And herein lies the conundrum at the heart of the writer’s life: we are rewarded for our creativity and yet will risk surrendering it for something as seemingly small as a smile.

Fifty years separate me and my students, 50 years in age and experience.

06/01/2026

We long for publishers to say yes, to grant us their seal of approval, a time-honored longing that places writers in a decidedly subordinate position. But lately, more writers are reassessing their unhealthy relationship with publishers. One favorite example of this is Mike Sager.

Sager has been a writer for 40 years. He has written for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Esquire. In 2010, he won the American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine Award for profile writing. A number of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired movies and documentaries, including Boogie Nights. He has also written more than a dozen books and eBooks.

But what I most admire about Mike Sager is what he did in 2012. He founded his own publishing house, The Sager Group.

In this conversation with Writerland, he tells us how he did it, and more importantly, why.

“Writing is life. I wanted to make it pleasant.”

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. Click to read Writerland, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

05/23/2026

At the end of every semester I ask my students to bring to class a piece of music that sounds the way they’d like their writing to sound. It is a wonderful ritual, one made especially illuminating by the fact that no two students out of the two hundred or so who’ve done this have ever chosen the same music.
So many voices. So many songs. Which is yours?

At the end of every semester I ask my students to bring to class a piece of music that sounds the way they’d like their writing to sound.

05/19/2026

Grief takes many forms but what can make it feel so much worse is loneliness, the sense that no one understands my grief, or worse still, appreciates why I feel it. How do we report on it?

Writerland is a reader-supported publication.

05/14/2026

Our latest story, "Breastfeeding Grief," on an intimate loss and finding you're not alone in experiencing it. By Miriam Wasser.

"Of all the unexpected things I experienced as a first-time mom, not being able to breastfeed was the biggest surprise. I was unprepared for how I reacted and how River’s refusal to do it took over my life.

Obviously, some women can’t breastfeed their babies, or choose not to, and these mothers and their babies are just fine. But I did not choose to stop breastfeeding. In fact, it never occurred to me that my baby would have an opinion in the matter.

The shock I initially felt gave way to devastation, and I was consumed by an unrelenting sadness I couldn’t understand. I was also embarrassed to be this upset about breastfeeding — breastfeeding!? — and yet, there were days when my inability to do it felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me."

When my baby suddenly refused to nurse, I fell into despair

05/07/2026

The stories of our families offer so much that can tell us about ourselves, in ways that few other stories can. So time and again, we ascend to the metaphorical attic, and begin sifting through letters, keepsakes, photographs, postcards, train tickets – in short the detritus of lives that might hold the key to insight and illumination.

To borrow from the late and legendary sports writer Red Smith’s lament on being a writer: writing about families is easy…you just open a vein and bleed.

04/28/2026

This week, we covered the life and work of Mohamed Choukri (1935-2000), perhaps the most renowned Moroccan writer, a uniquely visceral narrator, and the great voice of Tangier.

“Two turning points forged his career as a writer: his stint in prison in 1955 and, much later, in a psychiatric hospital in 1977. The first is the most obvious: it was on the wall of his cell that he learned the first letters of the Arabic alphabet.

Choukri was famously illiterate until he was 21. His is an unlikely case when most authors’ biographies tell of precocious vocations, childhood poems, or the spark lit by early readings. Not every writer starts as a voracious bookworm, but I know of none so accomplished without any schooling whatsoever into adulthood.”

Read the full piece here: https://thedelacortereview.substack.com/p/chapter-211-a-writers-career-doesnt

Photo courtesy of Rachid Ouettassi: https://www.instagram.com/rachid.ouettassi/

Thank you to Monsef Bouali and Librairie des Colonnes.

Two turning points that forged Mohamed Choukri’s (1935-2000) career as a writer were his stint in prison in 1955 and, much later, in a psychiatric hospital in 1977.

04/25/2026

“We writers may not necessarily be a little nuts but, as seen from the outside, it must appear that what we choose to do with our working lives is crazy. Day in and day out, week and month and year after year we fill empty canvasses with combinations of words that, we hope, will succeed in achieving the miraculous: getting people to see and feel what we have seen and learned.”

I begin every semester by reading a paragraph from Norman Maclean’s “Young Men and Fire.” It comes midway through the book and appears out of nowhere.

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