Wednesday’s Work-in-Progress: Midrash on Happiness

by Erika Dreifus on
7

MidrashTriptych
So, last week I asked which of three topics you’d all like to hear more about. This week, I respond to (some of the) popular demand. Several of you commented that you’d like to hear more about the fiction workshop I’ve enrolled in. And that’s the real focus of the piece.

But we’ll also tiptoe into discussing “writing for free” here. And that’s because when you click on the image to try to read the text within it (the image does become legible when I click on it), you’ll see a piece that I’ve basically “written for free.”

Allow me to backtrack.

A few days after an in-workshop exercise generated the first draft of the text that you see in the image’s center column, a new idea came to me. (more…)

Sunday Sentence

by Erika Dreifus on
4

paley
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.”

Then Faith was ashamed to have wanted so much and so little all at the same time—to be so easily and personally satisfied in this terrible place, when everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round world’s nation-states—hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all into TV sets and newsrooms.

Source: Grace Paley, “Midrash on Happiness” (discovered via the fiction-writing class I mentioned on Wednesday)

Friday Finds for Writers

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Treasure Chest
Writing-related resources, news, and reflections to enjoy over the weekend.

  • “On a good day, twenty percent of the advice you get will be directly applicable to your work, and that’s a generous estimate.” This and more sage advice from Elizabeth McCracken for those contemplating MFA study.
  • Some excellent insights into book publicity in Maria Gagliano’s interview with Diana Franco on the Slice site.
  • As someone whose writing has and continues to be deeply influenced by her family history, I’m loving Maud Newton’s new series of interviews with authors about ancestry. I’m especially happy to see Celeste Ng featured in the latest installment.
  • A new interview is up on the MFA Day Job blog, this time with Morgan Parker, a poet and a museum educator.
  • And over on the Grub Street blog, Katrin Schumann offers some good radio-interview hints for writers.

    • Have a great weekend, all!