The Writer July 2013

WE’RE ENTERING THE TIME of year many of us think of as vacation time. Or as I like to call it: reading season. For readers of this magazine, it’s also a time when we might steal extra time writing – when the kids are at the beach, when the family has gone off for a day trip, when we sequester in a cabin by the lake, when we stop the grind of the academic calendar to let our writing minds be free of official deadlines. When I spoke this spring with Diane Paulus, the Tony Award-winning director at American Repertory Theater and writer of numerous creative theatrical events, I asked her what she does to refresh. “It’s a cliché,” she said, “but whenever you start moving, the ideas unlock. Whenever…

My husband and I have a running list of writing jokes that we pass back and forth when he’s trying to talk me off the Ledge of Despair. The Ledge of Despair is my name for the frightfully high psychic shelf where I totter unsteadily above the mental freeway that will spell my certain death if I leap, which is what I want to do. What drives me out there is my current writing project, languishing next to a letter from a coveted literary agent. In the letter, the agent promises nothing in the way of representation (yet) but alludes to grand possibilities. All I have to do is winnow down two memoirs of 600 pages into one heart-stopping, luminous 200-page pearl of literary genius, and then we’ll talk. The…

My favorite place to write is on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard sitting hidden behind a dune. Warm sands and absolute isolation, far from the teeming household and generation-laden lawn I love is essential, if only for an hour or two. – Rose Styron, poet and editor of Selected Letters of William Styron The season doesn’t really begin for me until I can sit and write on my porch without a jacket on. When I’m writing on the porch, I can trick myself into putting in four or five hours of work without necessarily feeling like I’m working. – W. Todd Kaneko, poet and short story writer I love to hike alone with a specific question in mind, and the deal I make with myself is that I can’t go…

Dina Nayeri Iranian American novelist Dina Nayeri’s debut novel A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea came out this year in more than 20 countries and 13 languages. Set in post-revolutionary Iran, the novel follows the life of a young Christian Persian woman – from girlhood into her early 20s – as she struggles to deal with being separated from her mother and twin sister, grows up in a country under the Ayatollah’s authoritarian rule and is eventually married off to a much older man. Nayeri’s writing has appeared in publications including Granta New Voices, Salon and Glamour, and she holds degrees from Princeton, Harvard and the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her second novel, In Transit, will be published next year by Riverhead. It follows an Iranian family that moves to Oklahoma.…

Should The Elements of Style by Strunk and White be on every writer’s shelf? WHEN E.B. WHITE was a student at Cornell, he took a course taught by William Strunk, Jr. Strunk had written one of the required texts for that course, a slim book he had printed privately. Decades later, a publisher asked White to revise the book for commercial publication. The name E. B. White may ring a bell. He’s the author of Charlotte’s Web. He has also written fiction for adults, poetry and essays. The Elements of Style is often billed as a must-have for writers, and for good reason. It includes clear, decisive rules, urging writers to “use the active voice” and “omit needless words.” The book focuses on the importance of concise writing. It is…

As the “touchscreen generation” learns to read, TV and technology developers have created a slew of interactive programs and apps that encourage literacy. The PBS television series Super WHY! features a cast of “super readers” who use fairy tales to solve problems and encourage literary skills in their preschool-aged audience. The Emmy-nominated program, written by Angela Santomero, recently toured the U.S. with a live show featuring music by Jack Antonoff of the band Fun. The show invites audience participation as the cast “travels” within the pages of a story. Interactive phone and tablet apps are also bringing literacy to tech-savvy youngsters. Tikatok Story Spark for Nook allows kids to write and illustrate their own eBooks. When their masterpiece is ready, users can “publish” books in both digital and hardcover form…