Midweek Notes from a Practicing Writer

Three brief updates from my desk.

1. Nothing to report this week about my own kidlit work, but I was thrilled to see two picturebooks by members of my critique group spotlighted in a big Publishers Weekly Fall 2021 preview piece. And I was also inspired by a virtual launch event for Sigal Samuel’s new release.

2. Reminder, for those of you with copies of Birthright: “The Book of Vashti” is perfect reading (or re-reading!) this Purim week.

3. This week, the class I’m teaching on Holocaust Literature is reading Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (trans. Stuart Woolf). And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this line, uttered by Levi, quoted in a short film that I’ve assigned my students: “My life has been marked by two fundamental facts: first, my detention at Auschwitz; and second, that I have written about my detention at Auschwitz.”

Against a background of lined comosition paper, the words "Midweek Notes from a Practicing Writer" appear

5 thoughts on “Midweek Notes from a Practicing Writer

  1. Paul Lamb says:

    I’ve read Levi’s The Periodic Table, but I cannot bring myself to read his (or Wiesel’s) accounts of his time in the concentration camps. I know I should, but I’m not made of the right stuff.

    1. Erika Dreifus says:

      Understandable. That’s been my feeling about *visiting* the camps.

    2. Nina Lehman says:

      I feel that if they can bear telling the story it is my responsibility to read/hear it.

      1. Erika Dreifus says:

        A valid point, Nina.

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