Revision Strategies: Beginnings
The author of Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America (Little A, 2021) offers advice on how to approach editing the beginnings of books and essays.
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Genre: Creative Nonfiction
The Grasshopper and the Ant
In Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ant, the grasshopper spends the summer playing music, singing, and dancing, while the ants spend all their time working to store up food for the winter. Traditionally, the moral of the story is about the importance of preparation and hard work, as once winter arrives, the grasshopper finds himself hungry and begs the ants for food. The children’s book The Ant or the Grasshopper? (Scribner, 2014) written by Toni Morrison and her son Slade Morrison complicates the conventional reading of the fable and questions the overlapping roles of art, labor, and value. The grasshopper Foxy G asks his ant friend Kid A, “How can you say I never worked a day? ART is WORK. It just looks like play.” Inspired by this spin, write an essay that reflects on how you see the role of the artist functioning in contemporary society. How do writers fit into our culture’s value systems?
Failure of Language
What happens when language fails? Writers are always in search of the mot juste, the perfect turn of poetic phrase, the best sequence of sentences for a story or essay. But in real life, communicating is not always about the most creative arrangement of words, and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time can hurt someone you love, especially when it’s in writing. This week consider writing a personal essay that reflects on memories of past experiences, situations, or encounters in which something went awry in the process of expressing yourself in words—perhaps due to crossed wires around usage, tone, or context. What forces were underlying the discrepancy or distance between intended and perceived sentiment? How does looking closely at this incident transform your understanding of language and its consequences?
Book Bans and the Global Battle of Freedom of Expression
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In this event from the 2024 Atlantic Festival on the topic of books bans in the United States and the world, Atlantic staff writer Gal Beckerman moderates a discussion with Cindy Hohl, president of the American Library Association, and Victoria Scott-Miller, owner of Liberation Station Bookstore, as well as a discussion with Iranian American journalist and activist Masih Alinejad and author and activist Rania Mamoun.
Glory Edim: Gather Me
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“Everything that I was able to write and put into this book was very liberating.” For this LIVE From NYPL event, Glory Edim talks about her decision to write Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me (Ballantine Books, 2024) and the underrepresentation of Black women in the memoir genre, as well as the complexities of memory in a conversation with Aminatou Sow.
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Patricia Coral: Women Surrounded by Water
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In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, Patricia Coral reads from her debut memoir, Women Surrounded by Water (Mad Creek Books, 2024), and talks about the experimental nature of her book in a conversation with Susan Coll. Women Surrounded by Water is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Ten Questions for Jessie van Eerden
“I found the creation of cohesion challenging; essays are disparate things, yet the book needs to make a whole.”—Jessie van Eerden, author of Yoke and Feather
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AAWW and Kundiman Present: Emerging Writers in Conversation
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In this event presented by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Kundiman, writers Hannah Bae, Jen Lue, Gina Chung, and Rajat Singh read from their work and participate in a conversation moderated by Thuy Phan, regional cochair of Kundiman Northeast.
Dealing
Spend some time jotting down notes or a list of things you have had a strong aversion to or found extremely disagreeable, allowing yourself to think generally, but honestly, about issues revolving around contemporary politics, ethics, or culture. In James Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time, he wrote: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Can you relate? Write an essay that examines the various components that form the basis for your grievances, where or from whom they might have originated, and how they may have been reinforced over time. Reflect on the pain beneath it all, if you were to reckon with this clinging to hate.
Their Borders, Our World
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In this event at the Southbank Centre in London celebrating the launch of the Palestine Festival of Literature’s anthology of essays, Their Borders, Our World: Building New Solidarities With Palestine (Haymarket Books, 2024), editor Mahdi Sabbagh and writers Jehan Bseiso and Mirza Waheed discuss the question of solidarity in a conversation moderated by Zena Agha.
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