Quotation of the Week: Mario Vargas Llosa (trans. Natasha Wimmer)

by Erika Dreifus on
5

The definining characteristic of the literary vocation may be that those who possess it experience the exercise of their craft as its own best reward, much superior to anything they might gain from the fruits of their labors. That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.

–Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist (translated by Natasha Wimmer)

Friday Find: ASJA’s Contracts Watch

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

This week, I received an e-mail from the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) which read, in part:

If you’ve missed Contracts Watch during its hiatus, good news: it’s back!

If you’re not familiar with Contracts Watch, take a look. The American Society of Journalists and Authors’ Contracts Committee reviews writing contracts and answers questions for both ASJA members and non-members, and the most interesting contract issues and trends are posted in a blog format on ASJA’s Contracts Watch.

Find the blog and RSS feed here:
http://www.ContractsWatch.org

You will find instructions for submitting your own thorny contract issues there as well.

I’m sorry to say that I hadn’t quite noticed the hiatus–but I am glad that the feature is back.

Hope you all have a nice weekend. See you back here on Monday!

Introducing "Quotation of the Week"

by Erika Dreifus on
3

This new blog feature stems from my sense of inadequacy when a friend contacted me last week hoping/expecting that I’d be able to help her out with a writing-related quotation. Despite my great love for bite-sized morsels of writing wit and wisdom, I was unable to do so.

So partially as a task of self-education, and partially as an effort to inspire all of you, I’m launching a new “Quotation of the Week” feature here on Practicing Writing. Please look for it on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

To kick things off, let’s turn to this gem from Paul Auster, which pretty much sums up how I feel about literary translation:

Dostoevsky, Heraclitus, Dante, Virgil, Homer, Cervantes, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Hölderlin, and scores of other poets and writers who have marked me forever – I, an American, whose only foreign language is French – have all been revealed to me, read by me, digested by me, in translation. Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.

Source: Foreword to To Be Translated or Not to Be: PEN/IRL Report on the International Situation of Literary Translation, edited by Esther Allen, available at www.centerforliterarytranslation.org.

Just for Emphasis

by Erika Dreifus on
3

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes memoiristic nonfiction (whether in poetry or prose) relevant to anyone beyond the writer. (Let’s just say that last week I was reading a very me, me, me essay–a published one–and subsequently was consumed with the wish to figure out how to avoid afflicting readers with similar unpleasantness in my own work.)

Then I recalled Lisa Romeo’s sage advice: “I constantly try to remind myself that people don’t read creative nonfiction because they care about what happened to me, but because they care about whether what happened to me might have some meaning for them.” I was marveling over that wisdom once again when I discovered Philip Graham’s new post offering some equally memorable commentary.

Take a moment to reread Lisa’s post, and to read Philip’s. Judging by the material I was reading last week, these craft points simply cannot be overemphasized.

Friday Find: AWP’s Hallmarks of an Effective Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

I receive LOTS of requests for advice on low-res programs. Sometimes, people ask me to tell them whether program A or B is “better.” Which I absolutely, positively, cannot do. A big part of this inability, of course, comes from the truth that what might be “better” to one person would be “worse” to another. (This is why I’m not such a fan of rankings.)

What can be helpful, however, is the capacity to assess what a program offers and try to determine how it matches up not only with your own needs as a writer, but also with this new set of “Hallmarks of an Effective Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing,” which has been developed by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

AWP does a pretty good job describing key elements of “Low-Residency Programs Based on Mentoring” and “Low-Residency Programs with Electronic Classrooms.” My only real disappointment with this document is that AWP has given relatively short shrift to what it calls “Hybrid Low-Residency MFA Programs.” This is the material on such programs, in its entirety:

Hybrid low-residency programs include features from both mentor-based and electronic classroom-based programs, and add variations and innovations of their own. Strong hybrid low-residency programs are rigorous and demand extensive reading assignments, practice in critical analysis, productivity in frequent writing and revision, and a residency component. Their particulars vary in ways too numerous to list here.

Perhaps too numerous to list in their entirety, but wouldn’t it have been helpful to provide at least a few specifics to sharpen that very general three-sentence statement?

In any case, AWP has certainly done a service for everyone with an investment in understanding, attending, administering, and/or teaching in a low-residency program, and for that, I’m grateful!

Now, have a great weekend, everyone. See you back here on Monday.