I Did It!
It doesn’t feel as though I’ve “accomplished” much, writing-wise, over this past week, but in the spirit of Lisa Romeo’s annual “I Did It!” lists, I’ll share a few things that I have managed to do over the past seven days.
Newsletter Alerts!
It’s one of those busy newsletter weeks for me. If you’re a Practicing Writer subscriber, your new issue went out this morning. And if you’re keeping up with Fig Tree Books, you’ve seen (I hope!) the issue that went out yesterday.
My Letter to Poets & Writers
I’ve spent a lot of time recently writing (and then, re-writing) a letter to Poets & Writers magazine regarding the “Dear President” feature that appears in the September/October issue. I’ll give the editors an opportunity to publish it before I go ahead and do so myself. Stay tuned.
At Summer’s End, a Look Back to Its Beginning
As we approach Labor Day, I think back to how this summer began: with my 25th college reunion. This week, I’m especially grateful to the spouse of one of my classmates, who wrote this piece for NPR, focusing on the memorial service that took place near the reunion’s end. (Yes, yours truly is the “literary maven” mentioned in the piece.)
From My Bookshelf
Last week I had the great pleasure of attending a celebration in honor of Marcela Sulak and her new translation, Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali (University of Texas Press). Sulak is another writer I’ve become acquainted with online. She is the author of three collections of poetry and three earlier book-length translations. She directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University, where she is an associate professor of English. She also hosts the weekly “Israel in Translation” podcast on TLV1 FM, which you’ll see listed on the My Machberet blogroll.
The evening gathering in New York was absolutely lovely. (more…)
Hot Off the Press
I am so happy to tell you that my poem “Homage to My Skull” appears in the current issue of the Medical Journal of Australia. Editor Leah Kaminsky suggested a perfect tweak (or two), and the MJA team has done a gorgeous job with the design/illustration.
(Unfortunately, the piece is behind a subscription paywall. So, for now, you’ll all just have to be patient and wait for it to pop up one day in my first full-length collection, right?)
But I can say some more about this poem. (more…)
About #AWP17
So, Monday morning brought news that lots of writers were waiting for—outcomes for panel proposals submitted for the program of the 2017 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference which will take place in Washington next February. I’ll cut to the chase: The proposal that I organized was rejected.
I wasn’t all that surprised. (At this point, I’m much more surprised when one of my panels is accepted.) Of course, it’s entirely possible that the rejection is a matter of sheer mathematics and the fact that far more proposals were submitted than could be accepted. I’m not going to speculate whew about any other reasons why the panel wasn’t approved.
But I will say a couple of other things. (more…)