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Friday Finds for Writers

by Erika Dreifus on
6

Treasure ChestWriting-related resources, news, and reflections to read over the weekend.

  • I must admit that I agree with Susan Kushner Resnick: Nonfiction should be nonfiction (or, “what don’t you understand about the word ‘non’?”). But not everyone concurs. What do you think?
  • On the Virginia Quarterly Review blog, Bethanne Patrick discerns “the biggest danger to anyone’s writing”.
  • Another excellent post from Carol Tice, this time on “the deadly math mistake that will make your freelance business fail.” (In other news, I’ll confess that Carol’s new guest-post policy disappoints me, since I’m no longer eligible to pitch.)
  • I don’t have a regular professorial gig, but I can nonetheless commiserate with much of Cathy Day’s post, “For the Man Who Called Me for Advice About How to Get Published.”
  • Here is something that I know that I need to (re)consider: “How to Organize the Writing Samples on Your Writer Website.” Many thanks to the Renegade Writer blog for posting and urging that consideration along. (I somehow feel as though my own situation is complicated by the fact that in addition to the diversity of nonfiction that I write, I’m also a fictionist and poet. If you have examples of sites that negotiate this challenge well–including your own–please share, in comments.)

    • Have a great weekend, everyone. See you back here on Monday!

    Friday Finds for Writers

    by Erika Dreifus on
    2

    Treasure ChestWriting-related resources, news, and reflections to read over the weekend.

  • We can’t all be students in the University of Michigan’s MFA program, but thanks to Fiction Writers Review, we can get a sense of Colson Whitehead’s recent visit there.
  • From the Ploughshares blog: “If you want to get out of the slush pile, one of the worst things you can do is write a lackluster first paragraph.”
  • The Knight Foundation has apologized for paying plagiarist Jonah Lehrer a $20,000 speaking fee.
  • New and worthy reads on the horizon, courtesy of The Quivering Pen and Fiction Writers Review.
  • Finally, just slightly later than the rest of us, The New York Times has discovered Goodreads.

    • Have a great weekend, everyone. See you back here on Monday!

    Thursday’s Work-in-Progress: Reading (and Promoting) the Enemy

    by Erika Dreifus on
    15

    Earlier this week, Twitter led me to agent Jennifer Laughran’s blog, where a post titled “Reading with the Enemy” had launched a really fascinating and complicated discussion about issues I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about myself (including over the past few weeks after reading Tracy Hahn-Burkett’s related post on “A Bit of Controversy in Your Platform?”).

    I encourage you to read Jennifer’s whole post, but I’m going to excerpt what I think are the key questions (they’re the ones I’m still thinking about, anyway): (more…)

    The Wednesday Web Browser for Writers

    by Erika Dreifus on
    2

    Midweek means that it’s time for me to share with you a few of this week’s online discoveries (so far!).

  • Let’s begin with an issue that is – ahem – not unfamiliar to me: the question of whether writers should discuss politics online, as raised by Tracy Hahn-Burkett for Beyond the Margins. (Oh, so complicated!)
  • On a not-unrelated note: If you haven’t yet read it, I’ve shared some views (and posed some questions) concerning “Günter Grass, My Book & Me” over on my other blog.
  • Any of you taking part in Robert Lee Brewer’s April Platform Challenge? I’ve been following along. It’s thanks to that challenge that you can now subscribe to Practicing Writing (and to the aforementioned “other blog,” My Machberet) by email. Just look to the right side of the screen for the nifty subscription boxes.
  • A few choice writing lessons from Constance Hale, on The New York Times Opinionator blog.
  • In case you haven’t heard, Fiction lost out big time at the Pulitzers this week. For those of us who don’t know much about how winners are chosen, Laura Miller provides some information.

    • “What Must Be Said”: Günter Grass, My Book & Me

    by Erika Dreifus on
    11

    In 2006, Günter Grass’s confession that he’d been a member of the Waffen SS surprised me. But it didn’t depress me. It didn’t anger me. Grass seemed appropriately ashamed and regretful. I knew him to be an advocate for Germany’s recognition of its Nazi past. He wasn’t asking for my forgiveness, but he would have had it, anyway.

    I’d read the closing words of his 2002 novel, Crabwalk, as a regretful but accepting acknowledgment of the lasting reverberations of this past, for all of us. Those lines—“It doesn’t end. Never does it end.”—moved me so deeply that I included them as one of two epigraphs for my short story collection, Quiet Americans. (The other epigraph, also from a Nobel laureate, is Imre Kertész’s “Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?”) My book is inspired largely by the histories and experiences of my paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1930s, and by my preoccupations with that legacy. The suggestions of the Holocaust’s enduring presence in other people’s minds, souls, and history seemed to be encapsulated in these lines. In fact, Grass and Crabwalk received another mention in one of the book’s stories, as part of the narrator’s point about wartime sufferings endured by non-Jewish German civilians. (Which, I believe, remains valid.)

    But now I have to look at the Grass epigraph differently. (more…)