Midweek Notes from This Practicing Writer

Three quick things:

cover of As One Fire Consumes Another1. Blurb basics. John Sibley Williams, whose forthcoming collection As One Fire Consumes Another I’m helping to publicize, has articulated some sage advice for acquiring your dream endorsements, and this week, those suggestions appear over on Trish Hopkinson’s website.

This may also be a good time to re-up a post of my own, which offers a case study of a successful endorsement (“blurb”) request.

Finally, in a Twitter exchange after John’s post went live, Trish pointed me toward additional writing on the subject of blurbs from Diane Lockward, poet and publisher.

2. Recent reads. At the moment, I’m “on track” insofar as my 2019 Goodreads Challenge is concerned— which means that I have finished three books since the new year began. The latest is Craig Morgan Teicher’s We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress (Essays).

I do track my reading on Goodreads, and I also provide “brief book reviews” (in truth, “brief book reactions”) right here on ErikaDreifus.com.

As I mention in my comments on We Begin in Gladness, I think that the book has already already given me my next “Sunday Sentence”: “A poem is something that can’t otherwise be said addressed to someone who can’t otherwise hear it.”

3. Application of the aforementioned line. That line from We Begin in Gladness was fresh in my mind when some other reading material—including an opinion piece by Michelle Alexander in last Sunday’s New York Times—prompted me to return to a poem of mine. I shared it anew on Twitter, and I’ll do so again right here.

One thought on “Midweek Notes from This Practicing Writer

  1. Judy says:

    Erika, don’t laugh at this thought-You and Ari Lesser collaborate on this one? Your poem as rap?
    I take issue only with the last lines-a fantasy-recent history proves over and over the futility of that.

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