People, Twitter is seriously great for discovering nifty, blogworthy quotations. Take this discovery via @The_Rumpus, who found it via @CherylStrayed
“If asking contributors to write for free then collecting 50K is good karma, what’s bad karma?”
–Steve Almond
Source: An e-mail exchange published in The Coachella Review.
Established in the U.S. by the Academy of American Poets 14 years ago, National Poetry Month is now celebrated each April. Check out this page for details on this year’s programs, events, and resources. Have a great weekend, and see you back here on Monday.
My story collection, Quiet Americans, begins with two quotations (epigraphs) leading into the larger work. I’ve always wondered if I’d need permission to use them, but until recently, I didn’t have a particularly urgent reason to find out.
Well, now that my book is slated for publication, a reason has arrived! The press that will be publishing my book is too small to have a full-fledged legal department of its own, so my first impulse was to send an e-mail message to a group of lawyer friends. But I soon decided that I should just keep digging on my own. Directly.
Both of the quotations are quite short. One is taken from a translated novel; the other, from a translated Nobel lecture.
A few days ago, I contacted the U.S. publisher of the translated novel (a publishing company which is big enough not only to have its permissions/rights department referenced on its site, but which also requires several weeks to process these requests). So, I wait.
For the Nobel lecture, I simply e-mailed the specified contact in Sweden and explained that I was writing to find out what I needed to do in order to include the line from the lecture as an epigraph for my collection. The response was swift and sweet: “You do not need our formal permission to make quotations.”
Wonderful! Let’s hope that the other response arrives soon and proves to be equally uncomplicated.
I’d love to hear from other practicing writers with permissions tales to tell. Or perhaps some tips or resources to share?
“All my writing was born out of anger. In order to contain it, I had to write. If I had not written, I would have exploded.” – Elie Wiesel
via The Paris Review (on Twitter)
The new issue of Ecotone celebrates the journal’s fifth anniversary, and it includes a wonderful interview conducted by editor Ben George with Ben Fountain. At one point, having earlier alluded to the global vision of Fountain’s short-story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, and discussed several of the stories within it, George comments:
“[Malcolm] Gladwell writes that the stories about Haiti are the strongest in your collection, that they feel as though they were ‘written from the inside looking out.’ But I think the lead story, for instance, which we mentioned earlier, feels every bit as much inside Colombia as the Haitian stories feel inside Haiti. Whereas you’ve been to Haiti about thirty times, you’ve never been to Colombia (or Sierra Leone or Myanmar). What is the difference for the fiction writer between having been there and not having been there?”
To which Fountain responds:
“It’s better to go. It would have been better if I had gone to Colombia, it would have been better if I had gone to Sierra Leone. You never know what you’re missing. You never know what you don’t know until you go. But you can’t always go. You don’t have unlimited time and unlimited money. And so you do the next best thing—you try to imagine yourself into these places. The way I did it was to read everything I could get my hands on and to talk to other people who might have information. If there were helpful movies or documentaries, I sought those out. I was just trying to soak it all up and imagine my way into it using that basic research and my own experience in similar places or similar situations. People write historical novels all the time, and in those the writer has to imagine himself or herself into a different era. I think it’s just as valid an exercise to try to do that with space, with the caveat that it’s always better to go if you can. But if you can’t, I think with diligence and a lot of work we can get close to it.”
Source: Ecotone 5.2 (spring 2010). Happily, Ecotone has posted the full interview online. Read and enjoy!