I’m on pace to read 116.8 books in 2015. It feels like something of a failure. In the U.S., 300,000 new titles were published last year. If all goes well, I’ll end the year having read 0.039 percent of that number. Globally, it’s in the millions. Some years back Google released what they considered to… Continue reading 116.8 Books in 365 Days
Category: Thoughts and Musings
The Writer’s Road Trip
By Ron Heacock Descended at least culturally if not genetically from the ranks of our most exulted literary road warriors – writers like John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey – my wife Karen Walasek and I have exercised and exorcised our wanderlust cyclically throughout our forty year marriage. There have been many, many journeys… Continue reading The Writer’s Road Trip
“Spotty-Handed Villainesses” Revisited
“[F]emale bad characters can…act as keys to doors we need to open, and as mirrors in which we can see more than just a pretty face. They can be explorations of moral freedom — because everyone’s choices are limited, and women’s choices have been more limited than men’s, but that doesn’t mean women can’t make… Continue reading “Spotty-Handed Villainesses” Revisited
On Writing and Vincent Van Gogh
By Tyler Whidden 1.) Write every day. Every goddamn day. What many don’t remember (or even knew to begin with) is that Vincent Van Gogh produced most of his body of work – over 2,000 pieces of art – in the last ten years of his life, and most of those were done in… Continue reading On Writing and Vincent Van Gogh
Limboland
Most writers live in Limboland. Limboland is that place you go to while waiting for someone (anyone!) to get back to you with a response to your work. The good thing is that it’s full of people just like you doing exactly what you’re doing…waiting for a response from a publisher or a theater. The… Continue reading Limboland
Amelia Earhart Didn’t Crash!
…and other thoughts on Making IT On graduation morning in July of 2011, a Goddard College advisor asked me how I felt about my post-Goddard future. There wasn’t a feeling. Just an image. A few weeks prior to graduation I had seen the Amelia Earhart biopic, starring Hilary Swank, and the final scene aptly depicted… Continue reading Amelia Earhart Didn’t Crash!
The Original World Wide Web
By Lucas M. Peters My polyglot wife is fond of telling me that as you are learning a new language, you are learning a new culture. Language, she says, is an extension of the culture of a place and its people. It is an unwieldy thing that has many strange branches and rules. It simultaneously… Continue reading The Original World Wide Web
Why Write Fiction?
I had an interesting conversation with someone recently, a conversation I have actually had with this person several times before, about a novel she was reading. She remarked that she didn’t know how the author knew the things he has written. In this case, it was how some Germans had behaved in WWII. The author… Continue reading Why Write Fiction?
How I Picked Up a Spade and Became a Writer
by Kimberly Mayer The year was 2000. The end of the second millennium, the beginning of the third. A recent transplant from Philadelphia to Seattle, one of the first things I did in my new land was enroll in The Master Gardener Program. King County is where the international program originated in 1973, and to… Continue reading How I Picked Up a Spade and Became a Writer
The Language of Myths
By Richard Panek You’d think a wall panel in the Galileo gallery in the Galileo wing of the Galileo Museum would be a good place to get an accurate context for Galileo’s historical significance. You’d be wrong: “These astronomical discoveries heralded a revolution destined to demolish an image of the universe that had lasted for… Continue reading The Language of Myths
Trapped in the Iron Maiden
For the last year, my body’s felt like it’s been trapped inside its own iron maiden. You know, one of those medieval torture devices the size of the human body with spikes in the interior. I read that the device was entirely made up, and that it wasn’t. I read that the first one, in… Continue reading Trapped in the Iron Maiden
How to Rewrite
A few weeks ago, a student wrote and asked me why I had given him an A- instead of an A as a final grade. This wasn’t at Goddard, obviously. I also teach television at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, which is far from our program and not just because of the letter grades, urban… Continue reading How to Rewrite
Physician, Screw Thyself
By Richard Panek The doctor was sitting in a chair next to the window, gazing out. His features gave nothing away, save serious thought. I watched him from my hospital bed, trying to discern meaning in his own effort to discern meaning in my symptoms. Silence. Finally, he turned back to me and spoke: “Medicine… Continue reading Physician, Screw Thyself
The X-men and Women in Us All
JC Sevcik on the writer in the world, the hero in us all… All my life, I’ve been a loner. As far back as I can remember, I’ve felt like an outcast. I did not have what anyone could possibly mistake for a happy childhood, but I always had stories. My father died when I… Continue reading The X-men and Women in Us All
As Long As You’re Singing
My best poetry teacher ever was a poet named Jack Myers who titled a book, As Long As You’re Happy. Pete Seeger once said, “there’s no such thing as a wrong note, as long as you’re singing.” When Pete Seeger died, I was surprised at how the news hit me—in the gut and made me weep… Continue reading As Long As You’re Singing
Rejection Makes You Stronger
Minneapolis AWP — Check! I write this sitting cross-legged on the nubby zebra-print carpet of Seattle’s SeaTac airport. A friend dropped me off an hour early and I couldn’t be happier with the extra time to just chill. At the risk of sounding cheerleader-ish, what I want to say to all the beautiful passersby is… Continue reading Rejection Makes You Stronger
Rock The Casbah (Redux)
First: Take a large breath. Do you know that moment when you are in your Bootcamp exercise class, trying not to look totally decrepit as you struggle to find the right form when the trainer commands that you do endless burpees and then the music changes to The Clash’s “Rock The Casbah,” but it isn’t… Continue reading Rock The Casbah (Redux)
Pitch Madness! How I Got My Agent
By Mia Siegert Recently, I participated in a Twitter and Blog Competition called Pitch Madness hosted by Brenda Drake. With increasing use of e-readers and social media marketing, writers are able to connect with agents and editors, sometimes having only 140-characters to pitch one’s book. If an agent’s attention is caught from just 140-characters, that… Continue reading Pitch Madness! How I Got My Agent
Urgency & the Word
For the first time in seventeen years—since I began writing books in my late twenties when I undertook advanced studies and completed my MFA—I found, in the fall of last year, that I no longer felt the urge to write anything. It was if for seventeen years I had been, without knowing it, on a… Continue reading Urgency & the Word
Science Fiction as Social Activism
by Chana Porter There is a TV show called Orphan Black which follows a woman as she discovers that she has many identical clones all over the world, the intentional orphans of a top secret genetics project. I’m most interested in Orphan Black as an exercise in empathy. The main character sees the person she… Continue reading Science Fiction as Social Activism