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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.
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.
301 pages, Paperback
Published October 20, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 31, 2026
In these times, as I teach writing in an institution being deliberately broken by a foul and narrow-minded administration, in a week when so many of my colleagues and coworkers lost their jobs, I found Mesle's REASONS & FEELINGS: WRITING FOR THE HUMANITIES NOW a necessary and wonderful read. There are many books addressing the crisis in the humanities, if that's what you need to learn about; this book touches on that, but it is really for all of us writers, researchers, teachers, students, scholars who are wondering how to write anything and make it count in the ongoing wake of this destruction. How do writers "conserve the conditions of a future in which a sustaining 'we' could thrive"? How can we engage with writing in a way where our optimism doesn’t ignore therealities of the pressures people live under?
Mesle's wonderful book is a craft book; a critical analysis of the practices, fields, institutions, and threats to the humanities; and a love song to writing itself. Its focus is "academic writing" but it widens the definition of that genre through its appreciation for the qualities that typify the best of our desire for knowledge: wonder, love, fun, intensity, curiosity, the kind of writing that "aims to enter the great ongoing conversation about poems and cities and bugs, by making a claim that something new, something true by our best current standards of knowing, has been learned." It's about the love of precise knowledge, difficult research, finely wrought ideas--all seen with deep compassion and understanding of the bold (or tired) flights and plunges we take in our work, under the best and the worst of writing situations. (About our Precious Writing Time, she reminds us that it can’t be seized only for individual good at the expense of all others, freeing oneself of precarity while leaving the conditions unaltered for all others. “Our writing loses value when the world of our readers gets worse.")
Mesle examines the good and the bad of our institutions and our practices (e.g. peer review, neoliberal destruction), and the contexts of power, privilege, and precarity by which these things, and our work within (or outside) them, get measured. Of the allegation that academic writing is "bad," Mesle concedes that it sometimes is but queries the assumptions behind that judgment hard, and says, acutely, "What's astonishing, then, isn't the 'badness,' but rather the dazzling act that, in such dire conditions, so many writers produce writing that's *so good.*"
Can I also mention how funny and charming the voice--narrative, or argumentative, or instructive--is here? I read this book because I wanted to, for the *work* reason of prepping for a book event, but also to be better at my job, and better at my writing--AND ALSO out of the complicated pleasure that comes from all these things, plus: it made me laugh in some grim situations (like this week. And like being stuck in Atlanta airport for 6.5 freaking hours. 10 hours, really, since it had been my choice to arrive early, omg). We really need to laugh--and be reminded that our writing matters--and to reminded of how we can make that practice better, not only for us, but also for our students and colleagues and everybody.
Mesle's wonderful book is a craft book; a critical analysis of the practices, fields, institutions, and threats to the humanities; and a love song to writing itself. Its focus is "academic writing" but it widens the definition of that genre through its appreciation for the qualities that typify the best of our desire for knowledge: wonder, love, fun, intensity, curiosity, the kind of writing that "aims to enter the great ongoing conversation about poems and cities and bugs, by making a claim that something new, something true by our best current standards of knowing, has been learned." It's about the love of precise knowledge, difficult research, finely wrought ideas--all seen with deep compassion and understanding of the bold (or tired) flights and plunges we take in our work, under the best and the worst of writing situations. (About our Precious Writing Time, she reminds us that it can’t be seized only for individual good at the expense of all others, freeing oneself of precarity while leaving the conditions unaltered for all others. “Our writing loses value when the world of our readers gets worse.")
Mesle examines the good and the bad of our institutions and our practices (e.g. peer review, neoliberal destruction), and the contexts of power, privilege, and precarity by which these things, and our work within (or outside) them, get measured. Of the allegation that academic writing is "bad," Mesle concedes that it sometimes is but queries the assumptions behind that judgment hard, and says, acutely, "What's astonishing, then, isn't the 'badness,' but rather the dazzling act that, in such dire conditions, so many writers produce writing that's *so good.*"
Can I also mention how funny and charming the voice--narrative, or argumentative, or instructive--is here? I read this book because I wanted to, for the *work* reason of prepping for a book event, but also to be better at my job, and better at my writing--AND ALSO out of the complicated pleasure that comes from all these things, plus: it made me laugh in some grim situations (like this week. And like being stuck in Atlanta airport for 6.5 freaking hours. 10 hours, really, since it had been my choice to arrive early, omg). We really need to laugh--and be reminded that our writing matters--and to reminded of how we can make that practice better, not only for us, but also for our students and colleagues and everybody.
February 20, 2026
whenever I open a book, I hope for the feeling that this one gave me. I carried it around, feeling less alone and more engaged in my life. Sarah Mesle thinks & writes extraordinarily well re: topics that matter to me and to so many of my friends. these topics are writing motivations; writing routines; where writing fits into the need to pay bills; how different genres of humanist writing advance different ends (academic and trade are both great!); feelings in relation to other writers; the relationship between writing & teaching. REASONS and FEELINGS lives up to its title — so many great reasons and feelings — and yet while I confidently feel (or reason?) that this book made me a better writer, I’m at a loss for words to convince you to love it. read it. talk abt it w/ me. one of many quotable lines, toward the end: “building a world in which I actually want to live, with the people I love, is never wasting my precious writing time.”
May 14, 2026
Nice. Thank you Dr. Mesle. Lots of excellent reflections on the right *approach* to writing. Mesle is more concerned with your motivations and sense of audience than with providing practical tips. That is not to say that practical tips are not present! They are. Rather, they are embedded in getting you right with your work.
June 6, 2026
The more that I read, the more that I realized that I was not this book's girl (target audience) because I did not realize how academic this would be. Would recommend for people interested in the infrastructure of humanities academia and it does offer good nuggets of writing wisdom (which is why I picked it up). Did provide some really great perspective but also put me in a reading slump.
July 8, 2026
Fabulous overview of how writing for and about the humanities has evolved and continues to remain important.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews