Last week the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced James Salter as the winner of its twenty-fifth annual PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. The author, whose collection Dusk and Other Stories (North Point Press, 1988) won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, will receive the five-thousand-dollar prize named in honor of story writer Bernard Malamud on December 7.

Salter is also the author of the story collection Last Night (Knopf, 2005), as well as novels such as A Sport and a Pastime (Doubleday, 1967), Light Years (Random House, 1975), and The Hunters (Harper, 1956). Also recognizing his contribution to short story form, he was awarded the 2010 Rea Award last summer.

Below is a brief digest of online access points to the literature and life of the author PEN/Malamud juror Alan Cheuse said "has shown us how to work with fire, flame, the laser, all the forces of life at the service of creating sentences that spark and make stories burn."

In a 1993 Paris Review interview (with Edward Hirsch), Salter said, "I've never had a story in The New Yorker; everything has been rejected." (Salter's story "Last Night" is available online in the November 18, 2002, issue of the New Yorker.) He also discusses practice (in solitude, in longhand), revision ("Normally I just go a sentence at a time"), and his own short fiction influences (Babel, Chekhov).

The Paris Review published a number of Salter stories, including "Am Strande von Tanger" (Fall 1968). Last year the journal awarded Salter the Hadada Prize, and celebrated the author with a month of coverage on the Paris Review Daily blog. (Online literary review fwriction paid similar tribute.)

The video below, the first in a series of four, Salter reads "Palm Court" from Last Night. The reading took place at an event held by the literary journal Narrative.

In Bird by Bird (Pantheon, 1994), Anne Lamott's classic instructional treatise on writing and life, the author says: "Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't—and, in fact, you're not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing." Keeping this in mind, write the beginnings of an essay whose direction and ending you don't yet know. Start small, focusing closely on a single place, person, or incident, without thinking ahead. Then keep going: Allow the writing to tell the story, and see what develops. 

The sixth literary pairing in the biennial Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative was announced earlier this month. The program, launched a decade ago, offers emerging artists the opportunity to spend a year under the tutelage of established professionals in their respective fields.

The 2012–2013 literature mentor, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, selected as her protégé thirty-seven-year-old British writer Naomi Alderman. The author of three novels—Disobedience (Viking, 2006), which won the Orange Award for New Writers, The Lessons (Viking, 2010), and The Liar's Gospel, forthcoming from Viking in August—Alderman is also a game designer (her latest, Zombies, Run!, is available as an iPhone app).

"The future is a subject of interest for both Margaret Atwood and me," Alderman says in an interview on the Rolex Arts Initiative website. "I have another life outside literary novels: I write computer games. I think games are going to be an important art form in the next hundred years. They’re only just beginning to approach what they'll be. Margaret’s work is grounded in the present, but also the same desire to look forward."

Atwood's thirteen novels include the dystopian classic The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the speculative work Oryx and Crake (2003), the Booker Prize–winning The Blind Assassin (2000), and, most recently, The Year of the Flood (2009). She is also the author of seven short story collections, as well as volumes of poetry and nonfiction and books for children.

In addition to time spent with her mentor in both London and Atwood's home city of Toronto, Alderman will receive twenty-five thousand dollars to subsidize her work during the mentorship year, followed by an additional twenty-five thousand after the program ends. Atwood, for her service as a mentor, receives an honorarium of fifty thousand dollars.

The finalists for this year's mentorship award, all interviewed by Atwood as part of the months-long protégé selection process, were Malaysian novelist Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening Is the Whole Day (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008); American author Claire Vaye Watkins, whose debut short story collection, Brattleborn, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in August; and South African writer Mary Watson, who won the Caine Prize for short fiction in 2006.

Past mentees include Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet Tracy K. Smith; Togolese novelist and Prix Goncourt finalist Edem Awumey; and Australian novelist Julia Leigh, who recently made her debut in the medium of film as writer and director of Sleeping Beauty (2011).

Think of a dramatic situation in which there is one main character. If you need to, steal a situtation from the news, such as "Man Dangles Child Over River" or "Woman Follows Couple Home From Mall." Based on this situation, write a sketch of the main character that explains how and why this person did what they did. What is it about his or her personality, past, and relationships that has brought him or her to this moment?

An ekphrasis is a poem about, describing, or inspired by, a piece of art. Rather than writing a poem based on a piece of art, try writing a poem inspired by an existing ekphrasis.

The fifth annual Our Life Stories Writers’ Conference took place April 28 at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento. This one-day conference, co-sponsored by the Ethel Hart Senior Center and Cosumnes River College, and supported by P&W, is designed for seniors and others interested in documenting their life stories. Project directors Alicia Black and Bubbles Miguel describe the event.

The celebration began the evening of Friday, April 27, when more than eighty people gathered at the Hart Senior Center in downtown Sacramento for a pre-conference reception. Attendees sipped port wine and dunked fresh fruit into a multi-tiered chocolate fountain while mingling with conference faculty and fellow participants. Faculty greeted participants, signed books, and read their own work for the crowd.

Early the following morning, more than 150 attendees and volunteers streamed past manicured lawns and flowering trees on the Cosumnes River College (CRC) campus to enter the conference room. Allegra Silberstein, poet laureate of the nearby town of Davis, kicked the day off with a reading. Jennifer Bayse Sander, a New York Times bestselling author, publisher, and former Random House senior editor, delivered the keynote address.

Participants dispersed to a nearby building to attend their selected morning workshops. The seven workshop offerings gave the writers an opportunity to learn about autobiographical narrative, poetry, memoir, and publishing. The workshops were led by a culturally diverse group of nationally and locally recognized writers. Offerings included “Painting with words: creating atmosphere in settings” by Kerstin Feindert, “Your life as a list of ten” by Susan Kelly-DeWitt, and “Who said that? Voice and point of view in fiction” by Kakwasi Somadhi.

After a catered Italian lunch accompanied by an enticing slice of strawberry cheesecake, Ginny McReynolds, CRC Dean of Humanities and Social Science, gave a keynote talk about the importance of writing on a regular basis. Once the afternoon workshops concluded, participants returned to submit their evaluations for prizes donated by local restaurants, private individuals, and a local winery. As attendees departed, many reported that they had met new people and enjoyed the chance to network and eat great food. Many promised to return next year, as their life stories continue to unfold.

Above: Emmanuel Sigauke signs a book. Left: Susan Kelly-DeWitt (standing) leads a workshop. Credit: Martin McIllroy.

Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

After more than a year of negotiations, a group of agents at International Creative Management (ICM) successfully reached an agreement to purchase a majority ownership of the company from the private-equity firm Rizvi Traverse Management LLC, and longtime ICM chief executive officer Jeffrey Berg. The Hollywood talent agency will now be known as ICM Partners and is controlled by a partnership of twenty-nine agents and executives from its film, television, publishing, and touring departments. The financial details of the agreement weren't revealed.

ICM was formed in 1975 through the merger of International Famous Agency and Creative Management Associates (which were themselves formed by earlier mergers). Rizvi Traverse Management paid ICM's founding owners seventy million dollars for a majority interest in the agency in 2005, which allowed ICM to purchase the Broder Webb Chervin Silbermann literary agency in 2006. According to the Wall Street Journal, in recent years, there were grumblings among the agents that Rizvi, a Connecticut-based financial company, did not show significant interest in the agency.

In the publishing world, one of ICM's best-known agents is Amanda "Binky" Urban, who represents Charles Frazier, Mary Karr, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Donna Tartt.