Friday Finds for Writers
Most Fridays the Practicing Writing blog shares writing and publishing resources, news, and reflections to peruse over the weekend. But it’s been an excruciating week for so many of us. And frankly, I’ve paid next-to-no attention to garden-variety news from the writing and publishing spheres.
On Wednesday, however, I received an email from Facing History and Ourselves, a Boston-based global nonprofit organization that I’ve admired for many years. The email introduced a “mini-lesson” titled “Processing Attacks in Israel and the Outbreak of War in the Region.”
The resource isn’t perfect. (What resource is?) But one of its segments impressed me as something that, though intended for educators and students, could be clarifying for writers as well, in our work and in the rest of our lives. It’s a section titled “Avoiding Antisemitic and Islamophobic Tropes in Discussing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
- Happening this week in Baltimore: the American Booksellers Association’s 15th annual Winter Institute. (Unless you’ve been living under that proverbial rock, you won’t be surprised to learn that Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt has been a discussion topic there.)
- Some tips, especially for freelancers, on “how to write a successful follow-up email.”
- “160 Things That Scare Me” is an essay included in the new (January 2020) issue of Brevity. The piece was “written collaboratively by Professor Jill Kolongowski’s Spring 2019 creative writing class at the College of San Mateo, ages 18-32.”
- “So the mob has the final edit.” That’s just one line in George Packer’s “The Enemies of Writing,” an essay adapted from his recent Hitchens Prize acceptance speech and published by The Atlantic.
- And of course, you’ll find the latest Jewish-lit links over on the My Machberet blog.
Have a great weekend.
