Update on our National Poetry Month Poetry Book Giveaway: Congratulations to #14 and #25 (Kelly Luce and newzoopoet), who won the Random.org lottery! Please e-mail me with your mailing addresses and your title preference–whoever writes to me first will get “dibs.” Congrats to the giveaway winners, and thank you all for playing along!
Let me tell you, it’s tough enough for us New Yorkers to manage to attend even a fraction of the literary events in NYC. And we live here! Obviously, it’s much harder when you live elsewhere.
That’s why all of us should be grateful to this Virtual Poetry Center from the 92nd Street Y:
“In a renewed effort to share with a wider contemporary audience some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this page (to be regularly updated) features archival recordings by some of the best writers of our time.”
Caution: Some programs are available only in excerpted form. Still, the chance to watch/hear from Chinua Achebe, David Grossman, Cynthia Ozick, Frank McCourt, and so many other literary luminaries (poets and prose writers) is a sheer gift.
Have a great weekend, all. See you back here on Monday!
(cross-referenced as the “featured resource” in the May issue of The Practicing Writer, which will go out to subscribers today.)
If you’ve been following my pre-publication posts, you already know that the material in my forthcoming story collection, Quiet Americans, has a great deal to do with my grandparents’ identities and experiences as Jews who escaped Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. And while only three of the seven stories in the book were written during the time I was an MFA student, suffice to say that more than just a few of the pieces in my thesis were similarly inspired.
This didn’t seem to worry two of my three thesis readers. But the third did express a reservation: “Too much grandparents and too much Holocaust.”
My faith in Henry James notwithstanding (recall the Jamesian dictum to allow the writer his/her donnée and criticize only what is made of it), that reader’s comment lingered (obviously!), and its impact wasn’t fully assuaged even when other, equally wise authority figures told me otherwise. During the past several days, however, the old warning has finally lost some of its sting. And for that, I am grateful to author Deborah Eisenberg.
Eisenberg, who has earned a mention here on the blog before, has a volume of collected stories out now. The release has prompted a profile on Tablet magazine, which begins as follows:
“I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents,” Deborah Eisenberg says…. “I’m not sure I can articulate this,” she continues, “but I’m in the generation that was brought up close enough to the war, the Holocaust, the camps, and yet was protected, to a degree that is amazing to think about now, in a world of synthetic safety. And I would say there was a current of anxiety that any child would have picked up on, probably continuing for several generations, underneath the very, very, very tense kind of perfect world in which I grew up.”
Thank you, Deborah Eisenberg, for somehow–in a way I’m not sure I can articulate–validating my book, and the path that brought me to it.
“I’m sorry.”
Such was the response of pretty much every editor who addressed an audience member’s question/complaint about slow submission response times during the panel on “The State of the Essay in the Publishing Marketplace” at Welcome Table Press‘ inaugural symposium, “In Praise of the Essay: Practice & Form,” which took place here in NYC last Saturday. (Whew! That is one long sentence I just wrote!)
As Guide to Literary Agents blog contributor Felice Prager astutely notes, “Authors are often so excited about finding representation that they sign an agreement without knowing if the agent is an ideal match. In addition to agreement-specific issues regarding money and terms, there are other questions you should ask before you sign anything.” Here are Prager’s 10 such questions. I sure wish that I’d seen them before I signed with my first agent, a perfectly nice person but, as it turned out, “not quite right” for me.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend. See you back here on Monday!