Erika Dreifus

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.”

• Meant to share these earlier. If you haven’t yet read R.L. Maizes’s “rejection erasure poems,” you’re in for a real treat!
• I’ve been anticipating A.O. Scott’s essay on William Maxwell since Pamela Paul tweeted out a preview—but I may actually wait to read it in print over the weekend.
• I’m not normally super-excited about novels that run 800+ pages, but I was delighted to learn that Oprah’s latest book-club pick is Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Song of W.E.B. DuBois. (For those who don’t yet know this: Jeffers may be a debut novelist, but she’s a much-published poet, too.)
• In which Robert Lee Brewer offers advice for asking for blurbs for your book. (For more on the same subject, check out this piece from my archive.)
• And you’ll find the latest Jewish-lit links posted over on the My Machberet blog.

May it be a good, peaceful weekend.