That would be National Novel Writing Month. The goal: Write a 50,000-word novel between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30. That’s crazy talk, you say. I agree. So of course I have signed up to do it. How do you like my chances? If there are other DC-based NaNoWriMo-ers out there—even in this acronym-soup town that’s a mouthful—let me know how you’re holding up under the strain of writing 1,667 words a day. Easy pie, as my 7-year-old would say…. Read more...
Much of the advice one hears about writing falls into what, for lack of a more inspired term, I’ll call the man-up category. As in: Just do it! Believe in your book! Persevere! Embrace your creativity! I’m all for confidence, although it’s not always in great supply in my life. I do believe that perseverance—which appears in many different forms, not all of them recognized by the Writer’s Marketplace crowd—is a very useful quality for a writer to have. We have all heard that lecture, and too often it has the effect of making the audience feel inadequate. (“If I… Read more...
In my latest foray for the Chronicle Review (“Creature Consciousness,” Oct. 18, 2009), I take a look at the field of animal studies, which has taken hold in many corners of the humanities and social sciences. By animal studies I don’t mean animal rights, articulated so forcefully by the likes of Peter Singer and Tom Regan. Philosophers and literary scholars working in animal studies have an agenda that might be revolutionary; they want to overturn the anthropocentric models of humanism and substitute a very different way of thinking about how human animals relate to other creatures. I also take a… Read more...
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the untimely death of the Yugoslav writer Danilo KiÅ¡ (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Encyclopedia of the Dead). My friend Rich Byrne pays tribute to KiÅ¡’ “painfully comic vision of human beings careening through a universe of injustice and accident,” and talks about how his work affected the Yugoslav/Serbian literary scene and how it anticipated the horrors to come: One of the great ironies of KiÅ¡’ career is that “Boris Davidovich” set off a lengthy war within Yugoslavia’s — and mainly Serbia’s — literary establishment that turned not upon interpretations of Stalinism (the vexed… Read more...
The comments feature on the blog isn’t working properly at the moment, so apologies if you’ve been trying to post and haven’t been able to get through. Ah, technology. We’re working on it…. Read more...
When word came down that TriQuarterly magazine would shift to an online-only, student-run model next year, the news rattled many in the lit-mag community (yes, there is one). In look and editorial feel, TriQuarterly helped invent the formula for what we think of—or what we have thought of—as the small literary magazine, a print powerhouse where writers on their way up could share space with some of the big names in the game. Ever since I can remember, which is longer now than I care to admit, the writers I’ve known have been jockeying to get their work into the… Read more...
