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:
“A baby is, grimly enough, a tiny reminder of your own mortality. For me, seeing the passage of time reflected in my ever-changing children was a good kick in the ass to get to what I most wanted to do: writing.” Debut novelist Rumaan Alam mediates on how parenthood has made him a better writer. (BuzzFeed)
The British Library has digitized and made public more than three hundred items—drafts, diaries, letters, and notebooks—of major twentieth-century writers including Virginia Woolf, Ted Hughes, and Angela Carter. Amongst the documents are several rejection letters, including T. S. Eliot’s letter to George Orwell declining to publish Animal Farm. What the manuscript needed, Eliot asserted, was “not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.” (Guardian)
Tim Cassedy, an English professor at Southern Methodist University, and a group of students have released a card game based on Shakespeare’s plays, “Bards Dispense Profanity.” Similar to the popular game “Cards Against Humanity,” players compete to create the most ribald sentences using phrases from the Bard’s plays. (Washington Post)
Macmillan has bought Pronoun, the self-publishing platform that was originally founded as Vook. Pronoun will continue to offer free self-publishing services to authors, but will develop more advanced digital tools and opportunities for self-published writers to transition to a traditional publishing contract. (Publishers Weekly)
At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter considers novels with “girl” in the title and whether this trend of books where “bad things happen to girls” is on its way out.
Kate Gavino, illustrator and writer of the popular blog and book Last Night’s Reading, narrates and illustrates a video about the ABC’s of being an Asian American writer including “I is for intersectionality” and “W is for The Woman Warrior.” (Margins)
“I like it when poems attempt some kind of internal legibility that gives them the opportunity to be wrong, to fail whatever terms one sets out for them. To mean something, and not just be some scrambled ream of vocabulary or disconnected, facile observations.” Josef Kaplan talks with fellow poet Monica McClure. (Believer)
