The Writer November/December 2012

Where in the world is The Writer? As many of our readers know, The Writer recently moved from its longtime home in Wisconsin back to its original home in the Boston area. You can still find it in all the same places online including Facebook and Twitter, and at various conferences, fairs and festivals, such as the last September’s National Book Festival in Washington, DC, where The Writer bumped into Junot Diaz, Annie Barrows and Siobhan Vivian. Now The Writer wants to know where in the world you are reading our publication. Submit a photo of yourself with an issue of The Writer magazine to tweditorial@madavor.com. We’ll select some of the photos to run in the magazine and on Facebook. Put our free e-mail newsletter to work: Don’t forget our…

MORE THAN 125 YEARS AGO, journalists William H. Hills and Robert Luce had a mission. They wanted to help writers think practically and expansively about their work and support the emergence and proliferation of storytelling on the page. So they did what any information-driven team of the late 19th century would do: They founded a magazine. Sounds crazy these days – with the print industry and the very trees themselves in peril. And yet, and yet. Those were the days of Buffalo Bill Cody, of new colleges sprouting up, of patents and operas and baseball games that would captivate the nation. Anything must have seemed possible. The magazine those two intrepid Boston Globe reporters founded, the magazine you are holding in your hands – or reading on your tablet or…

I reland is a small isle of some 4.5 million people to the west of a larger island, England, which colonized Ireland for centuries. To say that Ireland’s long history has been troubled is an understatement. Colonization, famine, sectarian violence and emigration have sadly defined the Emerald Isle. Yet Ireland’s greatest gift to the world has long been its writers. How has this tiny nation managed to produce so many literary legends? First, Ireland loves its authors. Walk into almost any pub in Dublin, as I did recently, and you’ll see paintings of writers on the walls. Most pubs will have Ireland’s famous four Nobel Prizewinning authors, poet William Butler Yeats (who won in 1923), playwright George Bernard Shaw (1925), playwright Samuel Beckett (1969) and poet Seamus Heaney (1995). You’re…

SOME MAGAZINES and journals accept unsolicited submissions of novel excerpts, but most do not. Always read writers guidelines to see what individual publications look for. Some writers find that a portion of their novel can stand alone as a complete short story and submit that. Technically, it is an excerpt, but it also functions as a complete work and fits the bill of a short story. Journals and magazines are open to this practice, and it can be a good way to build anticipation for your novel. But keep in mind: The story has to be its own entity. It cannot rely on other parts of the novel to make sense or feel satisfying and complete. Flip to the copyright page of some novels, and you’ll find acknowledgment of those…

WHERE YOU LIVE inevitably influences you and your writing. Even if you constantly travel, it informs your outlook (think The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home by Pico Iyer). Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion highlights a portion of Toronto, close to where I used to live. The Prince Edward Viaduct, also called the Bloor Viaduct, plays an important role in the book. One of its main characters, Rowland Harris oversees the viaduct’s construction: He loved this viaduct. It was his first child as head of Public Works, much of it planned before he took over but he had bullied it through. It was Harris who envisioned that it could carry not just cars but trains on a lower trestle. It could also…

Most fans of science fiction can quote the Litany Against Fear from Frank Herbert’s classic Dune series. It goes like this: I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. During many times in my life, such as the passing of my parents, this litany helped me to survive. Then one day, after receiving more rejection emails than I cared to keep track of, I altered the words of my favorite mantra to survive that moment, too. I…