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.”
- “The Best of Writer Beware 2021,” or “highlights of a busy year of scam hunting, scheme exposing, contract analyzing, and just plain crazy stuff.”
- Another reliably beautiful, poignant piece by Rick Chess—this time with references to poetry by Agi Mishol and prose by Atul Gawande.
- This week on Jane Friedman’s site: “How to Plan and Host Worthwhile Online Book Events.”
- An excellent panel on book reviewing—featuring Jo Livingstone, Daniel Mendelsohn, Paul Sehgal, Katy Waldman, and David Varno—kicked off a terrific event hosted last night by the National Book Critics Circle (I had to click away as they moved on to announce some NBCC award winners and longlistees, but that info is neatly summarized over here).
- Among this week’s Jewish lit links over on the My Machberet blog: an important piece about anti-Jewish bias in arts and culture (and a link to some further, writing-and-publishing-focused comments that I’ve shared on Twitter). I’ll add that more Jewish-book news broke yesterday after this post went live; I tried to keep up in relatively real time in a Twitter thread.
Happy weekend, everyone.