Innehållsförteckning för November - December 2022 från The Writer

Jump-Start Your Memoir: Write it from the Heart. Jan. 29-Feb. 2, 2023. Nancy Slonim Aronie, NPR commentator and author of Writing from the Heart, teaches a five-day workshop designed to help writers launch the project they’ve been dreaming about, whether it’s a memoir, a collection of poetry, a screenplay, or stories for one’s family members. Using prompts and candid discussions in a safe space, Slonim teaches participants how to silence their inner critic and write with authenticity. Held at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, this workshop includes daily yoga classes and fresh organic meals, as well as access to the 100-acre grounds featuring walking paths and hiking trails and lakefront property conducive to quiet reflection and writing time. Participants return home with a solid sense…

READERS CAN FEEL WHEN THEY’RE being manipulated, and they don’t like it. Make a character too pure, and watch readers revolt. An example of this is the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. As Oscar Wilde supposedly said, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing” – not what Dickens was going for, I suspect. Sophisticated readers know when an author is trying to force them to like or dislike a character, and they tend to push back. Dickens made Little Nell so utterly pure that her death became a symbol, not of innocence and childhood sacrifice in an uncaring industrial age (as I assume he intended) but of overly sentimental writing. Characters who are all good…

“All good writers write terrible first drafts. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.”– ANNE LAMOTT IF seasoned writers know one thing, they know this: you don’t get it right the first time. Now and then, you might find your voice or get your story down – and even, on occasion, with some flair – but most likely, you’ll have to do several drafts. A novel, for the most part, is a work in progress. But let’s think about that second draft because that’s where revision begins. What’s revision about? How much can you, or should you, accomplish in a second draft? Should you wait a while between the first and second drafts? Are you liable to mess up that first draft with…

Zakiya Dalila Harris recommends: Seven Days in June by Tia Williams Luster by Raven Leilani Chris Pavone recommends: Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews Jean Hanff Korelitz recommends: The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe Youngblood Hawke by Herman Wouk Laura Lam recommends: Book Lovers by Emily Henry The Hating Game by Sally Thorne…

APRIL BRADLEY WAS LOOKING through her grandmother’s recipes at Thanksgiving during the pandemic when she decided to launch a literary food magazine. “I was thinking about what it would be like to have a community cookbook from the flash fiction and nonfiction community,” she says, “and how I’d love to see what writers could do with the recipe form.” She spent some time researching scholarship on recipe interpretations as narratives and got on Twitter to test the public’s reaction to such a magazine. “I got so many responses from people who said they’d love to contribute,” she explains. And so, in June 2022, she launched Ruby – a biannual literary magazine that specializes in short-form stories about food. Tone, editorial content Bradley gravitates toward narratives that offer a memorable voice…

This month’s The Nightstand picks from Steffan Triplett Getting to know queer literature At the time of this printing, Ellen DeGeneres will have been out for 25 years. Is that an awfully flippant way to begin what is usually a serious literary column? Regretfully, it is what I, a cisgendered straight woman in her mid-40s, can offer in terms of my education about queerness and its place in the creative world. It also provides the backdrop for the interview I have with literary agent Sara Megibow of KT Literary, who has been a champion of queer literature nearly since DeGeneres’ famous on-screen moment with actor Laura Dern, in which DeGeneres’ sitcom character inadvertently uses the airport PA system to tell Dern’s character that she’s romantically interested. Megibow’s client list includes…

You have dreamed of being a self-published author. Hooray! But finding the way forward in the massive world of self-publishing can be daunting, to say the least. There are so many resources, platforms, opinions, and options, it can make you feel like you have just landed on this massive island, maps in hand, with no idea which direction to go first. You’ve heard you should start building an author platform, and you should have a website and be on social media, and you have no idea about formatting a book and what print on demand is…and the list goes on. Relax. Believe it or not, there is a way to traverse this self-publishing world without getting lost or too distracted along the way. Consider me your tour guide, and follow…

I have hosted The Drunken Odyssey: A Podcast About the Writing Life for over 10 years. This tenure does not make me a dinosaur of the medium, but I am a woolly mammoth, I suppose. I began the show two years after completing my MFA in fiction writing from New York University. That was the length of time I needed to miss the conversations about writing that helped define my MFA experience. In those two years, I finished my novel and yearned again for literary community – so I made my own with the podcast. In the first year, I invited my local writer friends to join me on the mics. I also persuaded writers I didn’t know to speak to me at the annual Association of Writers & Writing…

2023 Education Guide NEW ENGLAND Bay Path University Degree type: Online MFA in creative nonfiction. Concentrations: Publishing track, narrative medicine track, and teaching track. Contact: Bay Path University, 588 Longmeadow St., Longmeadow, MA 01106. 413-788-1233. Shawn Bernier, assistant director of graduate admissions, sbernier@baypath.edu baypath.edu/mfa Bennington College Degree type: Low-residency MFA in writing. Concentrations: Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Contact: Bennington College, One College Dr., Bennington, VT 05201. 802-440-4452. writing@bennington.edu bennington.edu/MFAWriting Boston University Degree type: MFA in creative writing. MFA in playwriting also available. Concentrations: Fiction and poetry. Contact: Creative Writing Program, 236 Bay State Rd., Boston, MA 02215. 617-353-2510. crwr@bu.edu bu.edu/creativewriting Brown University Degree type: MFA in literary arts. Concentrations: Fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting and nonfiction, or digital/cross-disciplinary writing. Contact: Literary Arts, Box 1923, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912. 401-863-3260. writing@brown.edu…

The Writer: It wasn’t until I got to the end of Ma and Me that I realized the events you’re talking about are very recent – your denouement occurs but a few years ago, and the book was published in 2022. One thing I always tell my students is that readers can tell when writers are trying to write their way through something and it’s just not ready. It’s half-baked; they’re rolling around in their own pain. That’s not the case with your work. How did you do it? Putsata Reang: I think that the interesting thing about working on memoir is that your life is still happening. And, of course, you do have to have an endpoint because books cannot go on forever. [Ed. note: Reang’s father-in-law’s death, which…

Audiobooks continue to rise in popularity. They are a bigger investment, but for established indie authors who have a solid readership, there are definite benefits to releasing an audiobook simultaneously with your eBook. If you want to pursue this, great options are available. Findaway Voices, a platform for worldwide retail, library, subscription, and direct sales distribution, recently launched its Marketplace, which connects authors with narrators, and it guides you through the process of creating your audiobook. ACX (a branch of Audible) is another option. Its distribution is limited to Audible, Amazon, and Apple. Record your own For authors who want more control over the production of their audiobooks, there is the DIY option. Studios like Ngano Press Studios or Literati Audio are available to help you through the process. You…

“Write what you know,” goes the old saying. Perhaps it’s surprising, then, that there aren’t more books about publishing. Because there’s nothing authors know better than the often-fickle world of publishing – the rewrites, the pressure to sell, the ying-yang of the artistic vs. the commercial experience. But when writers do write about publishing, how much do they get right? Where’s the line between information and entertainment? Can a writer without publishing experience trust what they read in a novel about the industry? We spoke with four authors who’ve written recent books set in publishing to get their answers. WHAT BOOKS ABOUT PUBLISHING GET RIGHT 1 Publishing remains very white Newsflash: The publishing houses’ supportive Juneteenth tweets do not change the makeup of the industry. It is still not diverse.…

You should tell the truth insofar as you remember it and insofar as that person’s story affects the story you are trying to tell. Dear Gigi, What is your advice on rules, experiences, and court cases concerning how far a memoir writer can go writing about other real people who are a part of the story? Thanks a lot, —SWIMMING IN MEMORIES Dear Swimming, I’m not a lawyer, so I’m going to stay away from the “court cases” part of your query and address the “rules and experiences” part of this. Reading between the lines, I’m going to assume that you are wanting to write a memoir, but you’re worried about getting the pants sued off of you. This is completely understandable, but since you’ve gone there pretty much right…