“I’m sorry.”
Such was the response of pretty much every editor who addressed an audience member’s question/complaint about slow submission response times during the panel on “The State of the Essay in the Publishing Marketplace” at Welcome Table Press‘ inaugural symposium, “In Praise of the Essay: Practice & Form,” which took place here in NYC last Saturday. (Whew! That is one long sentence I just wrote!)
There is much to appreciate in the wonderful collection of Saul Bellow’s letters to other writers that the New Yorker has published this week. (You’ll need a subscription to access the correspondence online.)
The letters contain a great deal of deep, seriously-considered material. But I couldn’t help focusing on one relatively short missive to Philip Roth, dated December 26, 1957.
Roth had evidently sent Bellow an early story, “Expect the Vandals.” With a little online digging, I discovered that the story was published in Esquire about a year later, in December 1958. A quick recheck of Roth’s literary biography confirms that at the time, he had yet to publish a book (his first, Goodbye, Columbus, was released in 1959).
Which makes Bellow’s closing comments to a virtual stranger (“Dear Philip Roth”) all the more meaningful:
“Look, try Henry Volkening at 522 Fifth Ave. My agent. A very good one, too. Best of luck. And forgive my having the mss. so long. I should have read it at once. But I don’t live right.”
Anyone know if Roth followed the recommendation?
Received via e-mail yesterday from Crazyhorse journal. Check out the quotations mentioned within, and consider others to send to Crazyhorse!
Crazyhorse Quick-Quote Contest
Do you have a favorite quote about writing, the creative process, or the writing life? E-mail it to Crazyhorse to enter it into the Crazyhorse Quick-Quote Contest.20 winners receive a free subscription to Crazyhorse.
Winning quotes will featured within the perpetual quote-display box at www.crazyhorsejournal.org and e-mailed to all.E-mail in quotes by writers, for writers – anything to do with writing. For example:
“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
–Raymond Carver“The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.”
–Sylvia Plath“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
–Franz Kafka“Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.”
–Thomas Berger“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.”
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subject line: QuoteEnter by midnight, April 17, 2010.
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People, Twitter is seriously great for discovering nifty, blogworthy quotations. Take this discovery via @The_Rumpus, who found it via @CherylStrayed
“If asking contributors to write for free then collecting 50K is good karma, what’s bad karma?”
–Steve Almond
Source: An e-mail exchange published in The Coachella Review.
The new issue of Ecotone celebrates the journal’s fifth anniversary, and it includes a wonderful interview conducted by editor Ben George with Ben Fountain. At one point, having earlier alluded to the global vision of Fountain’s short-story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, and discussed several of the stories within it, George comments:
“[Malcolm] Gladwell writes that the stories about Haiti are the strongest in your collection, that they feel as though they were ‘written from the inside looking out.’ But I think the lead story, for instance, which we mentioned earlier, feels every bit as much inside Colombia as the Haitian stories feel inside Haiti. Whereas you’ve been to Haiti about thirty times, you’ve never been to Colombia (or Sierra Leone or Myanmar). What is the difference for the fiction writer between having been there and not having been there?”
To which Fountain responds:
“It’s better to go. It would have been better if I had gone to Colombia, it would have been better if I had gone to Sierra Leone. You never know what you’re missing. You never know what you don’t know until you go. But you can’t always go. You don’t have unlimited time and unlimited money. And so you do the next best thing—you try to imagine yourself into these places. The way I did it was to read everything I could get my hands on and to talk to other people who might have information. If there were helpful movies or documentaries, I sought those out. I was just trying to soak it all up and imagine my way into it using that basic research and my own experience in similar places or similar situations. People write historical novels all the time, and in those the writer has to imagine himself or herself into a different era. I think it’s just as valid an exercise to try to do that with space, with the caveat that it’s always better to go if you can. But if you can’t, I think with diligence and a lot of work we can get close to it.”
Source: Ecotone 5.2 (spring 2010). Happily, Ecotone has posted the full interview online. Read and enjoy!