Finds for Writers
Each week (typically Fridays), the Practicing Writing blog offers writing and publishing resources, news, and reflections to peruse over the weekend.
- From Cincinnati Review Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: a specific angle on the subject of submission etiquette with “the scoop on withdrawals.”
- The latest from Victoria Strauss/Writers Beware: a warning against social-media marketing scams.
- From Teresa Wong for Writer’s Digest: “Every family’s story is worth telling, whether it’s epic, like my mom’s, or not. And if, like me, you believe that the purpose of great literature is to reveal what it feels like to be a person in the world—how wonderful, bewildering, and devastating life can be—then your family history, however boring it might seem, likely contains the seeds of a story that will be meaningful to others.” (I’ll add, though, that as far as I’m concerned, family stories need not always take the form of nonfiction/memoir.)
- On “changes to the Chicago Manual of Style — and why they matter” (Scott Huler for The Washington Post).
- This week on My Machberet: an array of current opportunities to publish/support Jewish writing. (A couple of these will be cross-posted next week in the October issue of The Practicing Writer 2.0; make sure you haven’t missed anything that was listed in the September issue!)
Wishing everyone a good weekend.
Erika,
Expanding on your point, I draw on family history for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, even hermit crab work, e.g., using a resume format to tell how my grandfather’s grocery in Ironbound Newark was chosen in 1915 as Newark’s #1 Milk Station to distribute pasteurized milk to immigrant families to stem childhood mortality. The resume was aimed at a matchmaker and I included a photo of my grandfather in front of his store, then realizing that the newspaper that sponsored the search for milk stations probably took the photo and it was made into a matchmaker’s card. (https://biostories.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Max-Krasner.pdf)
As you may know, I lead workshops on Writing Family History.