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.”

• “If you were someone who was on twitter, I think you must forget it. Eventually we will all quit it if we haven’t already. Put our words somewhere else. It won’t work the same, feel the same. But we will still have good ideas. And we can still find each other. Don’t ask me where. I don’t know where. But I think we will all be able to figure it out.” This isn’t the main point of Jami Attenberg’s latest Craft Talk post (titled “Why Write Anything”), but as I’ve been sensing that my own time on Twitter may be…more limited that I’d previously thought…it helped.
• Anyone else find crafting the ending of a piece to pose particular challenges? Check out this craft tip from Maggie Smith.
• There’s a fresh set of Jewish Literary Links awaiting your attention over on the My Machberet blog.
• “There are a lot of ways to feel bad about oneself, to feel overlooked, ignored, undervalued, invisible, witless, and talentless.” And as Christine Sneed notes, literary-awards season can certainly bring on those feelings.
• And one last thing: I’m already hard at work on the October edition of The Practicing Writer 2.0, which will go out next Friday (a tad earlier than usual). Which means that this weekend is an especially good time to make sure that you haven’t missed any of the opportunities included in our September issue. Many of those opportunities remain open for submissions!

Have a good weekend, all.