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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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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.”
Displaying 1 of 1 review