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.”
- Threaded thoughts on speaking engagements, via Jennifer Baker.
- From the March/April issue of Poets & Writers magazine: Michael Taeckens’s profile of book critic (and #FridayReads founder) Bethanne Patrick. (You’ll find some other selections from that issue that have been made available online over on the magazine’s website—they’re the pieces that aren’t marked “Print Only.”)
- ICYMI: Tell me what “narrative poetry” means to you.
- This week has introduced “Read Like a Writer,” a new series from Electric Literature “that examines a different element of the craft of fiction writing in each installment, using examples from the Recommended Reading archives. Each month, the editors of Recommended Reading—Halimah Marcus, Brandon Taylor, and Erin Bartnett—will select a few stories that illustrate a specific technique, style, or writing challenge.” Check out the first installment. (Spoiler: Its focus is on story endings, a subject that will be forever interesting to me.)
- And there’s a new batch of Jewish-lit links up on the My Machberet blog.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
