Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:
“Real growth for a writer, I tell my students, happens outside of the workshop, and it has nothing to do with the trappings of a career. To be a better writer requires finding a way to care about things more deeply and more broadly, to become more interested in the world, to observe it more finely.” Garth Greenwell describes how working as a high school teacher changed his writing. (BRICK)
Mark Eisner considers what Pablo Neruda’s poetry can teach people about resistance and how at the start of the Spanish Civil War the Chilean poet changed his poetic style from a “desolate, introverted experimental poetry” to “a decisive style, one that would compel others into action.” (Paris Review)
Former literary agent Nina Lorez Collins started a Facebook group—called What Would Virginia Woolf Do?—where “women of a certain age could talk about things they didn’t want to share with husbands, partners, or children,” which has inspired a book and a passionate, sometimes combative, community of 7,600 women. (New York Times)
On NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Sara Saedi talks about Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card, her new memoir about living in the U.S. for eighteen years as an undocumented immigrant from Iran.
“Bob Honey is an exercise in ass-showing, a 160-page self-own.” Claire Fallon reviews Sean Penn’s debut novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff. (Huffington Post)
“They were of profoundly different worlds and eras, O’Hara and Wallace, yet two peas in a pod.” Jeff Alessandrelli makes a case for the similarities between poet Frank O’Hara and the rapper Notorious B.I.G. (Full Stop)
Publishers Weekly has named Boulder Book Store in Colorado its bookstore of the year.
Of his collection of nearly a thousand poetry books, poet Hayan Charara describes which titles he turns to when he hits a roadblock with a poem. (Poetry Foundation)
