Save Your Darlings: Reasons, Feelings, And Humanist World Building Now

Humanities classrooms have always — sometimes without realizing it — partnered reasoning and feeling, offering their students what we might call “embodied intelligence” as a form of expertise. Now more than ever, the world needs this humanist skill. This talk will draw on Mesle’s new writing guide to consider how humanist writers, teachers and students can develop practical strategies to bind the writing we love to the world building we need.

Sarah Mesle is a professor of writing at the University of Southern California. The former senior humanities editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is also a regular contributor, Mesle is the founding coeditor of the digital magazine Avidly and the short-book series Avidly Reads. Her book Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women's Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity is forthcoming from Beacon Press (Aug 2026). Mesle’s writing has also appeared in venues ranging from Studies in American Fiction to InStyle to The New York Times Magazine.

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