Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2013 i The Writer

DURING THE FINAL STAGES of putting together each issue of this magazine, I am almost always surprised by a theme that stealthily slips into my consciousness as if secretly hired by the powerful collective wisdom of the writers gathered in these 50-some pages. Our editors believed we were knitting together stories in this issue about “the truth” about nonfiction writing – and yes, the predominance of these stories address those “truths” (shall we say). Pat Olsen’s investigation of the rules of personal essays, Alissa Quart’s reportorial training employed for a book about community outsiders, Kelly James-Enger’s tips on finding anecdotal sources for articles and both Nancy K. Miller’s and Jesmyn Ward’s observations on memoir. There it is: a treasure trove of nonfiction craft stories. But within each of the stories…

Founded in 1933, Kirkus has been one of the most recognizable and respected voices in the book world for 80 years. Kirkus Reviews magazine gives industry professionals a sneak peek at the books we read and the books we write. We asked Kirkus chief operating officer Meg LaBorde Kuehn to reflect on the history and mission of one of the industry’s tastemakers. Kirkus has been a bastion of the reading and writing world for nearly a century. What’s the biggest change in the company’s mission over the years? Remarkably, our mission has changed very little over the past 80 years. When she retired in 1963, Virginia Kirkus said of the company, “We are idealists. We love books.” Today, that sentiment still guides our business. We believe our brand will thrive…

When was the last time you gave your mind a break? I don’t mean the kind that includes web surfing or zoning out in front of the TV. Rather, I mean the conscious effort of sitting still in a quiet space and giving the mind-whirr a rest. A mere 10 minutes of daily meditation decreases the physical symptoms of stress and boosts mental agility. It’s an ideal tool for writers because it clears the mind and increases creative potential. The key to meditation is simple: Start now. After you’ve taken a moment to read through these three exercises, roll your shoulders back and enjoy as your mind slows from a boil to a simmer. Three Meditation Exercises Sit in a peaceful place. Begin with a 10-minute practice – aim to…

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As a writer and editor, I like making lists – especially when those lists have to do with writing and editing. I’m a quote collector and book suggestion hoarder. I write down good phrases, verbs and adjectives, making lists of words to string together down the road. And over the course of a writing career that has taken me to small-town and bigcity newspapers, magazines and an international education nonprofit, I have made a habit of jotting down the lessons big and small that the editors I have been lucky enough to work with have shared. From the classroom to the newsroom, the following tips have shaped my writing career and influenced how I work with other writers. 1. Leave your comfort zone. Get out into the world. To truly…

EVEN IF YOU DON’T RECOGNIZE ALISSA QUART’S BYLINE, you know her work. She wrote that article for the New York Times Sunday Review – you know, the one about how middle-class working parents are getting priced out of day care. The one you posted on Facebook only to have two dozen of your friends repost it. The one you emailed to your spouse. The one you wish you could’ve emailed to your boss. A poet turned journalist and nonfiction author, Quart has a knack for uncovering stories that are just under the radar and writing about them in a way that gets everyone talking. Whether she turns her focus to the politics of breast milk or how awesome TV writing is these days, Quart’s readers take notice. So do her…

1 It’s supposed to be hard. Like most writers when the true difficulty of their work reveals themselves, my first impulse is to say, “That’s way too tough to write about,” and to flee from it as fast as possible. Such a reaction, though, is often enough of a sign that you have an authentic project on your hands. It’s important for me to feel like I’m not a good enough writer to write the book I have in mind, to feel the pressure and intensity of having to rise to the occasion of the book I’m trying to write every day. I always feel like it’s supposed to be hard – that that’s a good thing, that that’s why I aspire to be a writer. 2 What is truth?…

1 Select words with possibility: If using single words for prompts, choose ones that might inspire or evoke an emotional response such as “anguish” or “longing.” 2 Be specific: Avoid words that are too encompassing such as “good,” “love,” or “hate.” Instead, try “warm-hearted,” “cherish” or “detest.” If the word is a color, go for the unusual – “crimson” instead of “red.” 3 Create dialogue with drama: If you choose to use a few words of speech for the prompt, hint at something dramatic. “Oh my God. You came back,” or “You’re not leaving me?” 4 Use strong verbs: Consider verbs such as “strive,” “gnaw” or “demolish.” Verbs that work as nouns, such as “strike,” elicit interesting results, too. 5 Avoid the esoteric or overly remote: The prompts should be…

Photography by Jacob Belcher In his quiet Emerson College office overlooking the Boston Common, novelist Steve Yarbrough does not hesitate. He tilts his head toward the window, his smile thoughtful. “I think most of the people walking around out there, they know they couldn’t be concert pianists,” he says, his Mississippi accent warm and lilting. “They probably know they can’t paint a great picture. But almost every one of them can write a sentence. I think it’s an inherent part of being an American that we all believe we have our own story. And truly, we do all have our own stories. But I’m not convinced that everybody can write it, or that everybody should die trying.” He leans back in his chair, resting his elbows on the armrests. “I…

As much a reader as a writer, Steve Yarbrough has collected and cherished more than 4,000 books in his Massachusetts home. Students – and visitors – rarely leave his Emerson office without a new reading recommendation. “I really think books are the best teachers,” he says. Yarbrough dug through his expansive library for 10 novels and short story collections that have had an impact on his life and work. • All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell • At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott • The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman by Andrzej Szczypiorski • Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf by Alfred Doblin • Embers by Sándor Márai • Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino • Light Years by James Salter • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert • Separate…

Thanks to an American literary journal, students in Grand Ntumwa – a school in Uganda – have new supplies and salaried teachers. Cura Orphanage, which provides care and education for Kenyan children who have lost their parents to AIDS, has funding for construction of a secondary school. CAB Magazine, founded in 2011 by writers Jordan Hartt and Jeremy Voigt, publishes fiction, nonfiction and poetry similar to that found in other magazines. The difference? Readers purchase a full issue for $10, or each piece online for $2, and the money goes directly to a literacy program or educational institution. “We give to school administrations and let them decide how to use it,” Hartt says. “Sometimes it’s school supplies, sometimes it’s paying teachers’ salaries, sometimes capital improvement projects.” Proceeds from the March…

Four years from now, Jane Austen fans around the world will race to get hold of England’s new 10-pound note, which will feature a portrait of the author. Other writers have been depicted on currency in the past, such as the Brothers Grimm and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and others still do, including Sor (Sister) Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th-century Mexican poet who wrote what has been called the first feminist manifesto. Sor Juana, as she is known, has been on Mexico’s 200-pesos note since 1996. Time has muddied the waters of historical accuracy, and accounts of Sor Juana’s life read like the work of a novelist who can’t decide how to let the plot play out. What is clear is that she was a woman who could give…

I can never seem to get past the first draft. I know revising is important, but I just don’t know how to start, and I’m really dreading it. Help? The first draft can be an exhilarating experience. You’re learning about your characters, their circumstances and the conflict. You’re inventing scenes and settings. You’re immersed in that first flush of creation. During revision, you drive toward your intentions with more focus. Revision doesn’t have to be a hard slog. If the first draft is like frolicking in a meadow on a sunny day, the revision process is like flying a kite in that same sunny meadow. In the latter, your task is more defined, but there are still plenty of delights. Revision is an opportunity to delve deeper into your intentions…

We had a lively response to this prompt on Facebook: “You’re meeting someone in the park. Who is it?” How much can you pack into a couple sentences? Turns out: quite a bit. A few of our favorite – edited – responses follow. “I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and then looked around the park one more time for him. In the back of my throat I could smell rain coming and the nearby lake would overfill just as it did for my grandfather on this day, this very hour.” “A pretty blonde - pushing a tandem stroller housing two deliriously happy blonde toddlers - offered a smile that I happily returned. It was that kind of day. I hoped that they’d be out of sight by the…

I was in my 50s when I began dating online, but I quickly learned that the “older singles sites” did not represent me. Silver-haired people, very elegant, walked on beaches, wrinkled hands clasped. So sweet, but I was not there yet. Other sites seemed too young and fiercely hip. The gauge-eared, eyebrow-pierced, leather-clad set strummed electric guitars and showed pictures of bungee jumping and riding Harleys. In fact, everyone – in all ages, across social class, and on every site – seemed to own Harleys. While I had been out of the dating world, there had been a great profusion of motorcycles riders. Now they were looking for love. Where did I fit into all this? Each dating website came with its own vernacular, codes and tricks. On this one,…

I started my freelance career writing personal essays, and I still love to write them. Having something to say is key for me, which may sound like I’m stating the obvious when it comes to this genre. (Isn’t that why everyone writes an essay?) But when I am so obsessed about an idea that I can’t wait to put pen to paper, the essay almost writes itself. That’s not to say I don’t struggle over every word, or that I’m done after the first draft. Even so, my favorites are the ones that started with a thought that would not go away. I’ve had essays published in The Chicago Tribune, Spirituality and Health, NextAvenue.org and Proto on topics such as an unlikely friendship, the doctor-patient relationship and buying my 21-year-old…

Most of the people in this book share what I think of as post-identity politics – they are part of marginal groups united by chosen politics and tastes. Even the groups in this book who are initially outsiders by dint of more traditional identity markers – their mental illness, their gender nonconformity – now occupy specialized chosen niches such as Mad Pride or trans feminism. More than forty years after “coolness” became a product heavily sold to American teenagers and then adults via blue jeans and rock’n’roll, the people in this book represent a range of responses to the commercialization of, well, everything. Today, many acts of rebellion have become extremely elaborate negotiations with commercial culture. In a market-driven country where capitalism is all-consuming, most of the outsiders in this…

Most men in my family make widows of their wives and orphans of their children. I am the exception. My only child, Kate, was struck and killed by a car riding her bicycle home from the beach one afternoon in September, a year ago. She was thirteen. My wife, Susan, and I separated soon afterward. I was walking in the woods when Kate died. I asked her the day before if she wanted to pack a lunch and go to Enon River to hike around and feed the birds and maybe rent a canoe. The birds were tame and ate seed from people’s hands. From the first time I’d taken her she’d been enchanted with the chickadees and titmice and nuthatches that pecked seeds from her palm, and when she…

Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones sports the gold medallion boasting of its National Book Award. Two years later, Ward is back in the literary spotlight with her memoir Men We Reaped, a raw portrayal of her life growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the deaths of five young men she knew. The memoir begins and ends with the passing of Ward’s younger brother, Joshua. Using an experimental plot structure, she tells the story forward from her birth and backward from the death of the fifth unfortunate young man, Roger. Both storylines meet in the final chapter, intersecting at the moment of Joshua’s death. Ward, a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan and an assistant professor at the University of South Alabama, found…

They were both fifty when they moved to Massachusetts, settling in a small town a few miles north of Boston. Like a lot of people around the country over the last few years, they’d recently experienced a run of bad luck. Due to the state budget crisis, she’d lost her job as vice president for academic personnel at a large University of California campus in the Sacramento Valley. The year before her layoff, everyone, even the football coaches, had been subjected to mandatory furloughs, and things had turned ugly as the union blamed the shortfall on “managerial bloat.” She’d had a hand in denying tenure to a number of professors, and many faculty members rejoiced when the administration was reorganized and she received her pink slip. His business was construction.…

The elevator door slid open. A sign in the alcove read: “No Public Access.” Somewhere down these somber halls was my target: an office within the Library of Congress administration section that might solve a problem that had baffled me for months. My first book – a nonfiction exposé of World War II’s largest Army court-martial – had initially been published in hardcover. Weeks after its release, a history professor invited me to coffee. With a slow, stern shake of his head, he opened his copy of my book and pointed to the copyright page. “Your CIP,” he said, “is hopelessly misleading.” “CIP,” I would soon learn, is the Cataloging-in-Publication record. Written by the Library of Congress, it’s printed beneath the copyright and the ISBN on a copyright page. A…

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Chang-rae Lee is a novelist and a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. Lee was born in Korea and moved to the U.S. with his family at the age of 3. He has won many awards for his writing, including the PEN/Hemmingway Award in 1995 for his debut novel Native Speaker, and he was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for his novel The Surrendered. Lee’s fiction is characterized by spare yet weighty prose that often depicts protagonists dealing with isolation and displacement. His latest novel On Such a Full Sea will be published in 2014. WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU’VE LEARNED ABOUT WRITING? It’s impossible to boil anything down about writing to the “most important” notion, but one of the things that has…

’Tis the season for gift giving. We asked six authors with recently published novels to offer tips – as gifts to aspiring writers. “Believe. If you truly believe in your story, you will edit it ruthlessly and polish every line until the whole is as perfect as you can make it.” —Brenda Novak, Take Me Home for Christmas “Always put the book you’re writing first. Your work in progress should come before marketing and promotion. Your work in progress should come before answering email. No matter where you are in your career, the book is always the most important thing.” —Bella Andre, Kissing Under the Mistletoe “Simply write. We can talk about our dreams, spend copious amounts of time plotting our novels, even make up sheets of goals, but what…

M. Jaela Covington @BitterSweetJae I’m always happy when I finish writing one chapter and start the next one. It means this novel is really moving fwd! :) #AmWriting #Fiction Meg Waite Clayton @MegWClayton Glamorous novelist Saturday: clean refrigerator, go to grocery store, bathe dog. You see why I write fiction, yes? Grace Black @blackinkpinkdsk Awkward moments in real life make for excellent fiction. #writing Harsh Snehanshu @harshsnehanshu Fiction writing has a side-effect. It makes you a compulsive liar. K. J. Neal @KJNealWriter I know I care about these characters now because I’m putting one through hell and my chest feels like it’s collapsing. #amwriting Chandra Kamaria !,BNBSJB After all, fiction is just real life in disguise. #writing…

Several months ago, a regional parenting magazine assigned me to write a piece on avoiding heart disease. A quick call to two local universities helped me locate a couple of medical experts, but I wanted more than an expert’s viewpoint. I wanted to hear from a mom who had experienced a heart attack. Reaching out through social media produced no leads, so I contacted the American Heart Association and asked for its public affairs department. Within 24 hours, I had the name of a local mom who had suffered a heart attack when her younger child was just a few weeks old. Her story became not only the lead for the piece, but also a dramatic example of how heart disease can affect women. Experts for articles are usually easy…

Kelly Caldwell teaches essay and opinion writing and other creative nonfiction courses for Gotham Writers’ Workshop, where she is also dean of faculty. Her work has appeared in many publications, and her story “Garret Girl” was named a notable essay by the editors of the Best American Essays series and anthologized in If These Walls Could Talk: Thoughts of Home. When you teach the personal essay, what is the first “myth” you have to bust about the genre? That to write a personal essay, all you have to do is craft a story out of the experience. There is always another subject to the personal essay, a subject that is larger than the personal experience of the writer. Most of us share personal stories every day. What can we learn…

Imagine meeting an ancient alchemist who is not only willing, but also able, to talk about turning scrap metal into gold and mixing up a potent little brew of life elixir on the side. But if there is magic in the craft – as there surely is – there’s also work and plenty of it, as Paul Harding can attest. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Tinkers and set off on a book tour during which he wrote most of his newest novel, Enon, in hotel rooms and on airplanes. Enon is the story of Charlie Crosby in the year following the death of his teenage daughter Kate. The book honors sorrow with a combination of honesty and imagination that enriches understanding and experience. I asked Harding what it is…

SEVEN PEOPLE sit around the table. I call out the first prompt: “Chill.” I set the timer, an old-fashioned windup model that will ring loudly in 10 minutes. I open my notebook, pick up my pen and begin to write along with the others. To my left is an elderly man with wild white eyebrows. He writes to keep the memory of his daughter alive. She died 40 years ago. Next to him is a young mother who would like to write a best-seller. She has never written fiction. Beside her is a journalist who has published several books of nonfiction and hopes to write a memoir. On the other side of the table, a woman with a novel in progress explains she has been suffering from writer’s block. A…

How did Ward do? What makes this story real to you? One day my brother wasn’t there, and the next day he was. He was born at Memorial Hospital in Gulfport, Mississippi. He was yellow and fat, his eyes large and liquid. His mouth gaped with gums. Sometimes my mother let me sit in a chair and hold him, his body stretching from my shoulder down and across my legs. I remember snippets of him as a baby, but not enough to grow him from infant to toddler in the narrative of his life. Joshua was born on time at nine months, but he wasn’t an easy delivery. My mother says he was born looking at a sky he could not yet see: sunny-side up, the doctor called it. The…

Throughout nearly 30 years as a creative writing professor, Yarbrough has met hundreds of accomplished and aspiring writers. He shares the top five qualities a writer needs to succeed. 1. A willingness to work hard 2. The ability to cope with rejection and “get back off the floor after you’ve been knocked down” 3. A curiosity about the world 4. An openness to new experiences and eagerness to “step into the shoes of somebody who’s very different from you” 5. The basic ability to use language correctly…

The winter doldrums can be powerful for writers, which is one of the reasons an intimate five-day writer’s retreat takes place on the Florida coast. The Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers’ Conference in New Smyrna Beach is an environment of “beautiful concentration,” says Alison Granucci, president and founder of Blue Flower Arts. Each year, attendees select a week of workshops in fiction, memoir or poetry and enjoy one-on-one time with other writers and faculty. “Something gets ignited because of the intimacy of the three [genre] groups being there together and sharing all of their meals,” Granucci says. “People experience breakthroughs in their writing that they have not been able to get to in other scenarios.” Limited to just 13 students in each of the three genres, the conference registration is…

If you studied feminist literature in the 1980s, Nancy K. Miller is a familiar name, if not a guidepost. She was the first full-time tenured professor in the women’s studies program at Barnard College, where she also earned an undergraduate degree. With the late Carolyn Heilbrun, she founded the Gender and Culture Series at Columbia University Press. A professor of English and comparative literature at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, she is the author or editor of a dozen books, including her newest, Breathless: An American Girl in Paris, in which she revisits the years she spent in Paris during the 1960s and the disconnect from her Jewish upbringing. “I went to Paris because I was enamored of the sexy nouvelle vague movies, which, like…