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Friday Find: Best Tweeps for Writers to Follow

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Robert “My Name Is Not Bob” Lee Brewer posted his (apparently now-annual) list of “Best Tweeps for Writers to Follow” last week, and I am surprised and honored to find myself listed (and within the “tweeps who are kinda like gurus” category, no less!).

Whether you’re just getting started on Twitter, or you want to consider some additional writing-focused tweeps to follow, go check out the list and its creative categories. Huge thanks to Robert for doing this work (and for including me!).

Have a good weekend, everyone. See you back here on Monday.

Friday Find: CLMP Audio Archive

by Erika Dreifus on
3

Since I’m home on medical leave these days, I actually have more time than usual to listen to podcasts. And I’m happy to have discovered this audio archive from the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), which features recordings from past panels and sessions of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) and the Literary Writers Conference (LWC).

You’ll find here an impressive range of topics. I’ve just dipped into the recording of “Marketing Your Book Online: Virtual Touring, Social Media, and Promotion in the Digital Age,” but I suspect that several others–“Rejection, Revision, Resubmission” and “So You’ve Made an eBook–Now What,” just for starters–are not too distant in my listening future.

Enjoy the weekend, and see you back here next week.

Thursday Work-in-Progress: Starting a New Short Story

by Erika Dreifus on
4

It has taken me a couple of months, but I think that I’m finally ready to reframe these Thursday blog posts. Instead of sharing tidbits from the post-publication phase of my story collection, Quiet Americans, I’m going to focus on new work-in-progress: fiction, poetry, book reviews, essays, and freelance assignments. Assignments, drafts, revisions, submissions, applications, and so forth. The possibilities are, as they say, limitless.

I’m still home on medical leave this week, but I’ve had somewhat more energy, and I have been able to spend some decent chunks of time reading text longer than a magazine article and writing text longer than a tweet. My main accomplishment is a completed first draft of a new short story.

This isn’t just any short story. This is my first commissioned short story, and the commission seems to have resulted from the “commissioner” having read Quiet Americans. I don’t want to say too much about the project, because I am superstitious. Until the story is out there for you to enjoy, I don’t want to give too many details.

But I will say something about the process of writing this draft. (more…)

Thursday’s Post-Publication Post: More About Book Clubs

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

As if the promise of a video visit with yours truly were not enough to entice book clubs around the world to order truckloads of copies of Quiet Americans, here’s another incentive: author Robin Black’s magnificent and generous manifesto (as I am terming it): “A Book Club Guide to Discussing Short Story Collections.”

Black, author of the acclaimed If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, explains:

I’m writing this because in the year and a half since my short story collection came out, I have had some amazing experiences discussing it with book clubs but I have also been told by many other groups that they find it hard to “tackle” story collections. First they run into a too-common reluctance to read those books at all, but then, for reasons inherent to the form, it’s also difficult to structure a conversation. There isn’t one set of characters to discuss. There isn’t one plot. There may even be stories that feel as though different authors wrote them. These things may seem obvious, but how to craft a cohesive discussion in spite of them, isn’t so clear.

And so I have been thinking about advice to give, strategies to suggest, mostly because I really do believe that although the approach may have to be be a little different, the experience of talking about stories is truly one of the great joys to be found among exchanges about literature.

Please go read Black’s suggested strategies. And then, please suggest that your club take up the cause of the short-story collection. You certainly don’t have to choose Quiet Americans. (But of course, I’ll be grateful if you do!)

The Wednesday Web Browser for Writers

by Erika Dreifus on
2
  • The fact that I live in NYC by no means makes me an expert on literary life here. So I’m delighted to see the latest addition to the Poets & Writers City Guides: New York City!
  • I’ve just finished reading an advance reading copy (provided by Coffee House Press) of Ben Lerner’s novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. Since I have no idea when I’ll be able to offer cogent commentary of my own on this most intriguing work, I’ll point you to David Shields’s contribution for the Los Angeles Review of Books in the meantime. (But stay tuned: I do have a review of another Coffee House book in the works.)
  • Fadra Nally discusses “How to Get Unfollowed on Twitter.”
  • Another social-media tidbit: In “When Students Friend Me,” Cathy Day offers a sample text that other teachers might adapt to explain their social-media policies on syllabi.
  • I’ve read a number of commentaries sparked by the recent release of the film version of Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help. Nothing is quite like Roxane Gay’s essay for The Rumpus.
  • Kelly James-Enger suggests “5 Ways to Take Your Freelance Career Seriously.”
  • Remember my explanation re: how I got to know author Rebecca Makkai? Here’s a lovely essay that Rebecca has written about the online community where we “met.”