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Monday Morning Markets/Jobs/Opportunities

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled
  • Really interesting opportunity for poets in the five boroughs of New York City: “Poets House is proud to inaugurate its Emerging Poets Residency Program. Funded by a generous grant from the Jerome Foundation, this program offers focused, rigorous and nurturing peer support, as well as a robust professional network of contacts and advisors who assist each emerging poet with his or her artistic development. The program includes weekly workshops, mentoring sessions, guest speakers, free access to Poets House’s events and resources and culminates in a final reading. Childcare and transportation support is available for participants.” There is no application fee. Deadline: December 1, 2011.
  • “The Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival is pleased to announce the establishment of the ‘Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize.’ The Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize, a cash award of $400, will be awarded to the best Brooklyn-focused non-fiction essay or short story which is set in Brooklyn and is about Brooklyn and/or Brooklyn people/characters. We are seeking compelling Brooklyn stories from writers with a broad range of backgrounds and ages who can render Brooklyn’s rich soul and intangible qualities through the writer’s actual experiences in Brooklyn. From the collection of selected Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize submissions, five authors will be selected to read from their work and discuss their Brooklyn stories with the audience at our December 16, 2011, Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival program in partnership with St. Francis College in the Maroni Theatre. These stories and several other submitted stories will be published on the Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival website and made available to the public.” There is no entry fee. Deadline: November 25, 2011. (via Poets & Writers)
  • Tomorrow, Orion magazine opens for a (brief) window during which unsolicited work may be submitted. The window closes on November 15, 2011. NB: “No unsolicited poetry, please.”
  • A paid media project internship (20 hrs/week) is available with the California Council for the Humanities (San Francisco). Pays: $15/hour.
  • The November issue of The Practicing Writer went out to subscribers on Saturday. As usual, the newsletter features LOTS of paying calls and no-fee competitions for poets, fictionists, and writers of creative nonfiction. If you’re not a subscriber, you can find the current issue here.
  • Nonprofit Quarterly (Boston) seeks a Senior Online Editor, the Children’s Literacy Initiative (Philadelphia) is looking for an Executive Director, and Columbia University (New York) invites applications for a Director of Publications (req. #064000).
  • Fitchburg State University (Mass.) seeks an Assistant Professor (English/Professional Writing): “Full time, tenure track assistant professor position in English Studies, with a specialty in creative nonfiction and fiction writing. Courses include, but are not limited to: Feature and Magazine Writing and Editing and Publishing, as well as first-year writing. Development of new courses that support the English Studies curriculum is also required. All courses will have a focus on writing in the digital environment as well as for traditional media.”
  • “The Department of English at Northern Michigan University invites applications for a tenure track position in creative writing: Fiction. MFA or PhD required. Expectations include publications, successful teaching experience at the college level, the ability to teach undergraduate and graduate workshops, and undergraduate composition and/or literature courses.”
  • From Colorado State University: “Assistant Professor of Creative Writing:

    Nine-month, tenure-track appointment with a 2-2 courseload to begin August 15, 2012. Specialization in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction.”

  • “The Department of English and Communications at Norwich University [Vt.] invites applications for a tenure-track English faculty position in creative writing, with specialization in creative nonfiction and poetry, to begin fall 2012. All faculty teach a 4/4 schedule of courses; for this position, the schedule will include freshman composition, world literature surveys, and introductory and advanced creative writing.”

Thursday’s Work-in-Progress: Inspired by the High Holy Days

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Technically, I won’t be working at all today. That’s because today I am celebrating the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah).

Unoffically, I’ll be bearing in mind a poem-in-progress (there, that sounds better than “failed poem”). I began working on this poem several months ago. It has to do with certain ideas and feelings that I have about a particular aspect of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy. I’m hoping that something in today’s services will throw a new and useful light on the poem.

Meantime, I’m pleased to dig up from the archive another piece of writing inspired by the Jewish High Holy Days. This is an essay that dates back to a college workshop in creative nonfiction. I hope that you enjoy it.

And for everyone who is celebrating today: L’shanah tovah!

Thursday’s Post-Publication Post: Summer’s End

by Erika Dreifus on
2

Remember when I posted my summer to-do list? What sort of progress have I made? I’ll share that below, in a second update-reprint (click here for the first one). 

North of the equator, we’ve just begun summer. Although I’m still going to be working 40 hours a week in my day job, still running the usual errands, still partaking in the same family responsibilities (and joys), I’m also hoping to accomplish certain writing-related goals before we merge into fall.

After all, for six weeks this summer, my 40 hours at the office will be recalibrated: heavier on Mondays-Thursdays with “summer Fridays” off. I hope to use those Fridays wisely. And I hope that I can use the general light and energy of the summer to help infuse some projects under way and others that I hope to start.

Herewith, items on my list of writerly hopes, plans, ambitions, and commitments for the season.

(more…)

The Wednesday Web Browser

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled
  • On The Quivering Pen, David Abrams presents Katharine Weber’s account of her first “rejection of rejection,” which also happened to lead to her first fiction in print—in The New Yorker.
  • The Writer magazine knows that you may have depended on Borders to buy your copies of the magazine. And the editors don’t want to lose you.
  • You don’t need to be a print subscriber, but you do need to register with the Writermag.com website to read what four current/recent writing students–two in traditional MFA programs, one in a low-res program, and one in PhD program–have to say about their experiences (and what they wished they’d known ahead of time).
  • Over on The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s site, Alan Jacobs argues: “We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading.”
  • But here’s one way that we may be able to kindle a love for reading in the next generation. (Kindle. Get it?)
  • If your writing practice includes the teaching of college writing, you may want to check out this Q&A with the authors of The College Writing Toolkit: Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing.
  • The 2011 Atlantic Fiction Issue is on newsstands now. And it’s online. There are several wonderful stories in this issue, including Ariel Dorfman’s “The Last Copy,” Sarah Turcotte’s “Scars,” Jerome Charyn’s “Little Sister,” and Elizabeth McKenzie’s “Someone I’d Like You to Meet.” (I admire Austin Bunn’s “How to Win an Unwinnable War,” especially for its glance back at the last years of the Cold War, too. But having grown up in New Jersey with plenty of friends attending the Governor’s School as rising high school seniors, I was perhaps unreasonably distracted by the idea of seventh-grade Governor’s School students.)

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

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    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!