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.”
- “On Beginnings, Belonging, and Abandoning MFA Culture” (by Megan Pillow).
- “By her early 30s she had earned a law degree from Harvard, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PEN/Hemingway Award for her lauded debut novel, ‘The Grass Dancer.’ Then Mona Susan Power’s world went dark….Nearly three decades later, Power has found her way home — in several senses of the word — with the publication of ‘A Council of Dolls,’ a multifaceted and deeply felt novel-in-stories drawn largely from her own fraught family history.” Read the profile by Leah Greenblatt for The New York Times (gift link provided).
- Something else for authors to worry about.
- “Unless you’re in a classroom and the instructor is being paid to read your work, or you’re in a writing group where each member has the opportunity to submit a work-in-progress and receive feedback, it’s not good form to give your work to another writer (former or current instructor or not), unless it has specifically been requested, or you’re offering to pay this person for their time and expertise.” This, and much other wisdom, in Christine Sneed’s latest Bookish post (“The Favor Business”).
- And in the latest Jewish-lit links: James McBride, Sara Lippmann, Sefaria’s 10th anniversary, and more.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
