December 2011 Archives
Two Quick Things & the Happiest of Holidays
Dear lovely readers, thank you for another lovely year. I can't tell you how excited I get when I look on the world map of readers of this blog and see that not only my long-time stalwarts like Massachusetts and California are tuning in, but people from Edinburgh and Dubai and Berlin and Dakar and Singapore and Oslo and Taiwan drop by as well. How amazing is that?! It's as exciting as having pen pals when I was a kid, and it kind of blows my mind. Welcome, everybody!
The two quick things are no less wonderful because I'm going to be brief. (Grey arrives in the wee hours of the morning, and I've got homey holiday things to do.)
First, I'm proud as punch to be able to brag about my long-time friend Dr. Edie Simms and her new college consulting firm. At any stage of the process--high school students choosing a college, college graduates applying to law school or grad school, or grad students trying to make it through the thesis- or dissertation-writing process--Edie provides warm, smart, highly informed advice.
We were colleagues together at Wabash College some years ago, and I always admired Edie's ability to help the students plan their programs and their lives. I was (am!) a lousy academic advisor (my heart's not in it), and I turned to Edie repeatedly for help. She was always sane, organized, upbeat, and efficient. She loves the work. If you know anyone who's wrestling with any of those stages of academia, I recommend her firm highly. Edie is generous, warm-spirited, and extremely knowledgeable. I really love how she gets genuinely invested in the success of other people. It's not a business strategy; it's truly her nature. She's ideal for this kind of work; her heart is in it.
Second, thank you to all the people who helped publicize my column over at #Amwriting! "The Memoir as Psychological Thriller" had many enthusiastic readers (and a great comment), so I'm grateful for your help. It explains my one biggest piece of hard-won advice about writing memoir.
I have a couple of cool things coming up on the blog here. I need your help choosing an author photo from the recent shoot, so I'm going to put the top 5 up and see what you think. Also, the fantastic Anita Mumm from the Nelson Literary Agency is going to answer my grad students' smart questions about how to choose an agent and what to expect when you do.
Soon! In the meantime, have very happy, warm, safe, hilarious holidays. Love to everyone!
The two quick things are no less wonderful because I'm going to be brief. (Grey arrives in the wee hours of the morning, and I've got homey holiday things to do.)
First, I'm proud as punch to be able to brag about my long-time friend Dr. Edie Simms and her new college consulting firm. At any stage of the process--high school students choosing a college, college graduates applying to law school or grad school, or grad students trying to make it through the thesis- or dissertation-writing process--Edie provides warm, smart, highly informed advice.
We were colleagues together at Wabash College some years ago, and I always admired Edie's ability to help the students plan their programs and their lives. I was (am!) a lousy academic advisor (my heart's not in it), and I turned to Edie repeatedly for help. She was always sane, organized, upbeat, and efficient. She loves the work. If you know anyone who's wrestling with any of those stages of academia, I recommend her firm highly. Edie is generous, warm-spirited, and extremely knowledgeable. I really love how she gets genuinely invested in the success of other people. It's not a business strategy; it's truly her nature. She's ideal for this kind of work; her heart is in it.
Second, thank you to all the people who helped publicize my column over at #Amwriting! "The Memoir as Psychological Thriller" had many enthusiastic readers (and a great comment), so I'm grateful for your help. It explains my one biggest piece of hard-won advice about writing memoir.
I have a couple of cool things coming up on the blog here. I need your help choosing an author photo from the recent shoot, so I'm going to put the top 5 up and see what you think. Also, the fantastic Anita Mumm from the Nelson Literary Agency is going to answer my grad students' smart questions about how to choose an agent and what to expect when you do.
Soon! In the meantime, have very happy, warm, safe, hilarious holidays. Love to everyone!
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Insight
I'm very excited about the opportunity to write a guest-blog for #Amwriting next week. This is only my second-ever guest blog post, and I've been sifting through all the stuff in my brain for a topic. The goal of this particular blog is to offer writing advice to writers. And you may not have noticed, but that's pretty well trodden ground.
The interesting challenge for me is that, having taught creative writing now for umpteen years, what wisdom I have is kind of glommed into a mishmash of stuff, all of which I share with my students over the course of a semester. Much of it's from other writers--Helena María Viramontes, Brad Watson, Alice Friman, Tayari Jones, Ted Conover, Sandra Cisneros, Nancy Leonard, Robert Olen Butler, etc., etc.--whose craft talks and workshops I've attended over the years. Some of it's from terrific books I've read.
Only a bit of it--a wee little wedge of the pie chart--comprises entirely original insights, discoveries I've genuinely made all by myself. (And even those weren't all by myself, for I'm enmeshed in a web of--but let's not get precious here. I've already pushed it with wee little wedge.) And even my top three personal discoveries--which I'll share here for free because I'm unsavvy and hopeless when it comes to giving things away--are pretty common. (1. Draft longhand. 2. Let the piece cool for as long as possible before rereading to revise. 3. Read aloud to listen for sound, rhythm, music. See? All solid advice, but nothing particularly surprising or fresh.)
So I'm glad and relieved to have identified something I can genuinely contribute. It's a solution to a common problem.
The problem is this: writers of memoir commonly struggle with how to organize all the stuff. Once we think, Okay, I'm going to write the story of my life, the overwhelming amount of material--our whole life! closely and finely observed!--comes rushing into our consciousness, and it's like facing a nightmare closet. Where to begin? How to order it all? And what about that object (anecdote) that we just can't let go of, even though we know it really doesn't work anymore?
My answer is ingeniously simple, and it came directly from my own hard earned experience as a writer. I'll share it one week from today on December 20th on #Amwriting. (Any graduate students reading this: you already know what I'm going to say. Because you've heard me say it in class.)
By the way, old hands at writing, if you're interested in guest-blogging for #Amwriting, you should go check out the call for bloggers. Guest bloggers for January through March are being scheduled as I type.
Now I have to pick an image for the blog post. It's required. Hmm...
The interesting challenge for me is that, having taught creative writing now for umpteen years, what wisdom I have is kind of glommed into a mishmash of stuff, all of which I share with my students over the course of a semester. Much of it's from other writers--Helena María Viramontes, Brad Watson, Alice Friman, Tayari Jones, Ted Conover, Sandra Cisneros, Nancy Leonard, Robert Olen Butler, etc., etc.--whose craft talks and workshops I've attended over the years. Some of it's from terrific books I've read.
Only a bit of it--a wee little wedge of the pie chart--comprises entirely original insights, discoveries I've genuinely made all by myself. (And even those weren't all by myself, for I'm enmeshed in a web of--but let's not get precious here. I've already pushed it with wee little wedge.) And even my top three personal discoveries--which I'll share here for free because I'm unsavvy and hopeless when it comes to giving things away--are pretty common. (1. Draft longhand. 2. Let the piece cool for as long as possible before rereading to revise. 3. Read aloud to listen for sound, rhythm, music. See? All solid advice, but nothing particularly surprising or fresh.)
So I'm glad and relieved to have identified something I can genuinely contribute. It's a solution to a common problem.
The problem is this: writers of memoir commonly struggle with how to organize all the stuff. Once we think, Okay, I'm going to write the story of my life, the overwhelming amount of material--our whole life! closely and finely observed!--comes rushing into our consciousness, and it's like facing a nightmare closet. Where to begin? How to order it all? And what about that object (anecdote) that we just can't let go of, even though we know it really doesn't work anymore?
My answer is ingeniously simple, and it came directly from my own hard earned experience as a writer. I'll share it one week from today on December 20th on #Amwriting. (Any graduate students reading this: you already know what I'm going to say. Because you've heard me say it in class.)
By the way, old hands at writing, if you're interested in guest-blogging for #Amwriting, you should go check out the call for bloggers. Guest bloggers for January through March are being scheduled as I type.
Now I have to pick an image for the blog post. It's required. Hmm...
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Brevity
"I tend to like people who don't go on and on and on."
~Chrystos
Me, too. So I'm honored and thrilled to be guest-editing a special issue of the gorgeous journal Brevity, which specializes in very short creative nonfiction (750 words max) and is edited by the wonderful Dinty W. Moore.
This special issue responds to the revelatory results of the 2010 VIDA count, which looked at gender in literary publishing.
With this issue of Brevity, we're offering you (if you're a woman) a chance to write back to the current situation. Here's the call for submissions on Submishmash, and we're reading pieces now.
If you send something, shoot me an email and let me know. I'll keep an eye out.
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