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.”
- As a fan of Jacqueline Jules’s writing (both her kidlit and her work for adults), I’m grateful to have run across this Writers’ Rumpus interview about her forthcoming Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (illustrated by Eszter Anna Rácz). It’s evidently grounded in Jules’s experiences and impressions as someone who was living in Arlington, Virginia, on September 11, 2001. TBR, to be sure.
- In which Lincoln Michel recommends forcing yourself “to revise with arbitrary wordcounts.”
- “Worst of all, I couldn’t concentrate enough to compose sentences. Writing had been my haven since I was 6. Now, it was my family’s livelihood. I kept looking through my pre-covid novel drafts, desperately trying to prod my sticky, limp brain forward. But I was too tired to answer email, let alone grapple with my book.” From Madeline Miller’s powerful Washington Post essay about her experience with long Covid (gift link for access).
- You can now access portions of the September-October issue of Poets & Writers magazine online.
- And don’t miss the latest Jewish-lit links on My Machberet, featuring a fiction contest update from Hey Alma, author-scholar-translator-poet Aviya Kushner’s superb new Substack, and much more.
Have a wonderful weekend!
Erika, this was an especially helpful list of links. I thought I was just procrastinating on doing some send/shares, as I call submissions, but you actually helped me in ways that will impact my writing life on several levels. Just one example: Leah Myers, author of Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity (Norton, May) is one of the Poets and Writers non-fiction debut features you linked to. Her tribe, Jamestown S’Klallam, happens to be one of the tribes closest to my home here on the Olympic Peninsula. I’ve driven past there and attended conferences there my entire life. The nearby land I occupy happens to hold the coastal trails the S’Klallam, or Strong People, walked to S’Klallam summer camps located where I walked, played, and paddled as a child. I instantly ordered her book and will tell all my reading/writing friends to do the same. Thanks for the time you take to share about every aspect of the writing world.
Such meaningful associations! Thank you for sharing, Kirie.