Blogs
I maintain two blogs: Practicing Writing and My Machberet. Posts for both blogs show up on this page, but you can visit each blog by clicking on the appropriate link. It's also possible to subscribe to each feed.
Practicing Writing: Here you'll find updates on writing and publishing opportunities (especially handy between issues of our popular monthly newsletter). You'll discover ONLY opportunities that charge no fees, and ONLY publications/contests that will pay for your writing. The blog also shares writing-related news, resources, and quotations; book reviews; and occasional updates regarding this practicing writer's own work.
My Machberet: "Machberet" is the Hebrew word for notebook. Since it's also (appropriately) one of the very first words I learned in my first Hebrew school in Brooklyn (and, I confess, one of the few conversational Hebrew words I still remember), I've chosen it to title this blog, where I offer write-ups on Jewish news (especially of the literary sort) and occasional commentary.
by Erika Dreifus on Thursday, April 19, 2018
“The Jewish state builds my Jewish identity even if I spend my whole life in Los Angeles or New York or Miami.”
Source: Gil Troy, quoted in Jewish Journal in a discussion occasioned by the publication of his new anthology The Zionist Ideas.
And a brief note: I’m going to be taking a brief blogging break, so there will be no “Pre-Shabbat Jewish Literary Links” posted this week. In the meantime, you may wish to read more “words of the week”—from my own keyboard—in the form of my latest “View from the USA” column for the UK’s Jewish Chronicle. L’hitraot (“until we meet again”).
Labels: Israel, Words of the Week
by Erika Dreifus on Wednesday, April 18, 2018
Image description: laptop, open notebook, mug, flowers.
I’m about to take another break from blogging for a bit—I expect to be back in this space in about a week. Meantime, since there will be a delay until you see some Friday Finds and Monday Markets again, I’ll leave you with a couple of items to tide you over: Continue reading ›
Labels: Book Promotion, Contests, Midweek Notes, Quiet Americans, Social Media, Work-in-Progress
by Erika Dreifus on Monday, April 16, 2018
Monday brings the weekly batch of no-fee, paying competitions, contests, and calls for submissions—plus jobs for those of us who write (especially those of us who write fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction). Continue reading ›
Labels: Book Promotion, Creative Nonfiction, Essays, Fellowships, Fiction, Freelance Writing, Jobs for Writers (Non-Teaching), Literary Journals, Monday Markets, Poetry, Social Media, The Teaching of Writing
by Erika Dreifus on Sunday, April 15, 2018
In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
I knew that after the war my grandmother had started lecturing at Moscow State, and had consulted on a film about Ivan the Great (“gatherer of the lands of Rus”) which so reminded Joseph Stalin of himself that he gave her an apartment in central Moscow; that despite this she was forced out of Moscow State a few years later, at the height of the “anti-cosmopolitan”—i.e., anti-Jewish—campaign; and that she got by after that as a tutor and as a translator from other Slavic languages.
Source: Keith Gessen, “How Did We Come to Know You?” (The New Yorker)
Labels: Fiction, Sunday Sentence
by Erika Dreifus on Friday, April 13, 2018
Image description: wooden box filled with treasures/trinkets.
Labels: Book reviewing, TBR, Writing on Writing
by Erika Dreifus on Friday, April 13, 2018
Image description: pages of Hebrew text.
Labels: Holidays, Israel, J-Jobs, Jewish-American history, Literary Events, Resources for Jewish reading, TBR
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