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.”
- “Following the announcement that Penguin Random House parent company Bertelsmann won the bidding war for Simon & Schuster with a $2.2 billion offer, members of the book business and related organizations have begun to weigh in.” (Publishers Weekly)
- Thanksgiving poetry, sourced by poets laureate from several states.
- “Long before the coronavirus pandemic accelerated the devastation of newspapers and media outlets of all kinds, book reviews around the country had already started to disappear.” Against the backdrop of that truth, Casey Cep’s report on Chapter 16, a Tennessee-based “part-digital, part-print publication that covers literature and literary life in the state,” lifts this reader’s spirits.
- I can always use some refreshers when it comes to grammar—like these, from Writer’s Digest.
- And among the latest Jewish lit links over on the My Machberet blog, you’ll encounter a few words about Nicole Krauss’s short story “Drawing from Life,” which appears in the latest Harper’s.
Wishing you all a very good weekend.
