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Monday Markets/Jobs/Opportunities for Writers

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled
  • Brevity has announced an unusual contest, linked to the publication of A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel (by Robin Hemley). “For centuries writers have used participatory experience as a lens through which to better see the world at large and as a means of exploring the self. Immersion writing encompasses Immersion Memoir (in which the writer uses participatory experience to write about the Self), Immersion Journalism (in which the writer uses the Self to write about the world), and Travel Writing (a bit of both: the writer in the world and the world in the writer). Types of immersion writing within these broad categories include: the Reenactment, the Experiment, the Quest, the Investigation, and the Infiltration. Immersion, by the way, is defined as involvement in something that completely occupies all the time, energy, or concentration available. So, choose one of the immersion modes and knock yourself out, except that we are only allowing you 500 words.” Prizes: “First prize is a copy of A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel and $50, second prize is a signed copy of the immersive The Accidental Buddhist, and third prize is a showercap. All three winners will be published on the Brevity blog.” No entry fee. Deadline: May 11, 2012.
  • Attention, New England writers! Level Best Books is taking submissions for its tenth anthology, Best New England Crime Stories 2013: Blood Moon. Deadline: April 30, 2012. Pays: “Authors whose work is selected receive $25 and one free copy of the anthology.”
  • Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry: “The Kenyon Review, in partnership with Salt Publishing, UK, and the award-winning Earthworks Book Series, announces a competition for a first or second collection of poems by an Indigenous writer. The winning volume will be published by Salt, and the winning poet will give a reading at Kenyon College and receive a $1,000 honorarium.” No entry fee indicated. Submissions during the month of August 2012.
  • Paying editorial internship with The Root, “the leading online source of news and commentary from an African-American perspective”: “The Root has openings for summer editorial interns. Duties include but are not limited to: Writing, article and photo research, online comment moderation, social media posting and curating, preparing content for publication, answering phones, answering emails, and podcast production. The internship pays $10 per hour.”
  • Utica College (N.Y.) is looking for: “One-year assistant professor starting August 2012 with the possibility of renewal. Applicants should have expertise in creative nonfiction. Candidate will teach a minimum 4 course load per semester, including two sections of freshman composition, and one section of literature every semester, and a multi-genre beginning creative writing course and a course in creative nonfiction in alternating semesters.”
  • “The Delaware College of Art and Design (http://www.dcad.edu) is accepting applications for adjunct faculty to teach Writing and Literature. Fall semester begins on August 27, 2012. Teaching assignments may be possible for subsequent semesters, depending upon enrollment. Master’s degree required.
  • Idealist.org (New York) seeks a Writer & Editor, the Association of American Medical Colleges (Washington) is looking for a Writer/Editor, and the Idaho Education Association (Boise) invites applications for a Director of Communications position.

    • “What Must Be Said”: Günter Grass, My Book & Me

    by Erika Dreifus on
    11

    In 2006, Günter Grass’s confession that he’d been a member of the Waffen SS surprised me. But it didn’t depress me. It didn’t anger me. Grass seemed appropriately ashamed and regretful. I knew him to be an advocate for Germany’s recognition of its Nazi past. He wasn’t asking for my forgiveness, but he would have had it, anyway.

    I’d read the closing words of his 2002 novel, Crabwalk, as a regretful but accepting acknowledgment of the lasting reverberations of this past, for all of us. Those lines—“It doesn’t end. Never does it end.”—moved me so deeply that I included them as one of two epigraphs for my short story collection, Quiet Americans. (The other epigraph, also from a Nobel laureate, is Imre Kertész’s “Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?”) My book is inspired largely by the histories and experiences of my paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1930s, and by my preoccupations with that legacy. The suggestions of the Holocaust’s enduring presence in other people’s minds, souls, and history seemed to be encapsulated in these lines. In fact, Grass and Crabwalk received another mention in one of the book’s stories, as part of the narrator’s point about wartime sufferings endured by non-Jewish German civilians. (Which, I believe, remains valid.)

    But now I have to look at the Grass epigraph differently. (more…)

    Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled
    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
  • “The Story,” one of the stories in Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision that I found most affecting, has recently been posted online.
  • Coming soon at the Sixth Street Synagogue in NYC: the wordSpoke Poetry Festival.
  • Mazel tov to Herman Wouk on his latest book deal!
  • Jonathan Kirsch weighs in on Peter Beinart’s new book.
  • Looking ahead to next week: My Machberet will welcome guest blogger Ellen Cassedy. Get to know the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust before her “appearance” here.
  • Last call for my Sunday afternoon event with the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism here in NYC. Perhaps I’ll see you there?
  • And as the holiday draws to a close, D.G. Myers considers Passover in fiction.

    • Shabbat shalom!