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Friday Finds for Writers

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

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

  • “Some people move to New York to realize their literary dreams, but I had to leave.” Geeta Kothari explains why this was so in a beautiful essay for the VQR blog.
  • Judy Blume fans, New York magazine has some treats for you!
  • Among the highlights of my visit to the BIO conference last weekend was a panel on the politics and ethics of book reviewing. Quite a big topic, with so many threads to pursue. One that the panel didn’t have time to address–publishers’ strategic misuse of reviews for blurbing purposes–is at the heart of Ron Charles’s recent commentary. On a related note: Bethanne Patrick’s reflections on “why literary criticism still matters” are also worth a read.
  • Reflections on rejection, whether we’re talking about a McSweeney‘s submission or a tenure-track teaching job, from John Warner.
  • Also on the subject of submissions: Jennifer Niesslein offers “6 Rules of Thumb from an Editor-Turned-Writer” over on Jane Friedman’s blog. (I’ll confess some doubts about rule #2, but I’d have to do some major archival unearthing and analysis to see how many times my own experience may have disproved it.)
  • Just a reminder that you still have time to enter the Short Story Month Quiet Americans giveaway!

    • Have a great weekend, everyone. Yes, Monday’s a holiday here in the U.S., but the blog will be back then nonetheless!

    My College Classmate Sheryl Sandberg, the VIDA Count, and Lessons on Literary Leaning In

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    Yesterday on the Virginia Quarterly Review‘s blog, as part of the current issue’s focus on “the business of literature”:

    I doubt that Knopf/Random House planned it this way, but the publication of Sheryl Sandberg’s bestselling Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead coincided with the release of the latest VIDA Count. I suspect that Sandberg herself would be interested in the data that VIDA has provided regarding publication rates of women and men in what it calls “many of the writing world’s most respected literary outlets.” (Condensed findings: In most cases, women aren’t faring well in these venues.) Strikingly, some of Sandberg’s messages can be extrapolated beyond the worlds of leadership or corporate culture and applied to the world of poets, fiction writers, and essayists, perhaps especially as VIDA has described it.

    You can read the rest of my essay over on VQRonline.