Friday Find: Bread Loaf Lectures & Readings

Has the entire summer gone by without the chance to attend a writers’ conference? Never fear: A generous offering of readings and lectures from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference can be yours. All you have to do is go to middlebury.edu/blwc & scroll down the right column for new & past recordings. (Thanks to @tarabetts for the tip on Twitter!)

Have a great (and safe) weekend, everyone. See you back here on Monday.

Friday Find: Vintage Essay on “Writing What You Know”

I never knew John Gardner, yet I’m certain he would have hated the story I submitted to my first fiction workshop. In The Art of Fiction, Gardner denounced the tendency to transcribe personal memory onto the page; he understood it was precisely that practice that many people, especially beginning writers, equated with the famous dictum to “write what you know.” I had fallen into that trap myself. That first workshop submission proved it. I had not yet read Gardner. I did not appreciate that “Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche’s censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully and interestingly about own’s own home town, one’s Episcopalian mother, one’s crippled younger sister.”

So I wrote about my own home town.

So begins “Pushing the Limits of ‘Writing What You Know,'” an essay that I wrote many years ago.  Published originally in The Willamette Writer, it’s now available on ErikaDreifus.com, and I invite you to read the rest online.

Enjoy the weekend, and see you back here on Monday!

 

The Wednesday Web Browser for Writers

  • “33 Ways to Be Creative,” courtesy of Kelli Russell Agodon.
  • It’s prime writing conference season. Check out this dispatch from the One Story Summer Writers’ Workshop, and, from the other side of the country, Midge Raymond’s account of her time at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.
  • Caroline Leavitt’s blog profiles the Fiction Studio Imprint, which sounds as though it has some things in common with Last Light Studio, the micropress that published my own Quiet Americans.
  • This is great: “5 Things Your Bookseller Wants to Hear When You Propose a Bookstore Event.”
  • And for a change of pace: Help Nina Badzin’s husband name their baby. (All will become clear when you read the post.)