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The trailer for Are You My Mother? offers a glimpse into Alison Bechdel's fascinating "metabook," published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in which she investigates her mother's life in search of clues about the mother-daughter gulf. For a closer look, check out this issue's installment of The Written Image.
In Cheryl Strayed's new memoir, Wild (Knopf, 2012), the author recounts her months-long hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, a journey that she took entirely alone after life as she'd known it had fallen apart. "It was a world I'd never been to and yet had known was there all along," she says, "one I'd staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been." Write about a time when you got a little wild—when you embarked upon something new and challenging, maybe something frightening, or maybe even a little dangerous. Write about the wilderness itself, but also about what brought you there, and who you had become by the time you walked back out of the woods.
Write a piece of flash fiction or a short story that starts with an advice column. Use the advice column to introduce the story's protagonist, the central drama, or the back story of the characters. Alternatively, read through advice columns such as the Rumpus's Dear Sugar and Salon's Since You Asked and create a story based on the problem posed by one advice-seeker.
Poets & Writers Magazine reader Caroline Cottom of Oaxaca, Mexico, suggests Carolyn Forché's poetry collection The Country Between Us (HarperCollins, 1982), informed by Forché's work as a human rights activist in El Salvador.
It may be Ocho de Mayo, but it's not too late to watch Naomi Shihab Nye read her poem "Cinco de Mayo" (from Transfer, published by BOA Editions last year) for PBS NewHour's Weekly Poem.
A cento, Latin for "patchwork," is a poem composed entirely of fragments and lines taken from other poems and/or written sources. Try creating your own patchwork poem by incorporating lines from various poems in a poetry anthology. For inspiration, read David Lehman's cento in the New York Times.
The American Booksellers Association requests ABA members make their thoughts known on the agency model to the Department of Justice; twenty-four people recently undertook a full-scale re-enactment of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; author Emily St. John Mandel considers genre fiction and the marketing labels placed on books; and other news.
This month's selection from Motionpoems is Adam Tow's visual interpretation of David Wagoner's poem "Thoreau and the Lightning," from the collection After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2011).
In the ongoing court battle over book scans, Google seeks to dismiss the Authors Guild class-action suit; Time magazine visits author John Irving at his New Hampshire home; the professional life of Jane Austen; and other news.
Last night we attended a unique book launch for New York City poet Elana Bell, featured in our May/June 2012 issue's "Winners on Winning" feature. Bell, who incorporated a dance performance and fund-raiser into the celebration of her debut collection, is the recipient of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for Eyes, Stones, released in April by Louisiana State University Press.
When we interviewed Bell for our May/June article about the unexpected rewards of winning a book prize, she mentioned that she was using some of the prize money to realize an artistic vision. "Many of the poems in the collection are persona poems, in the voices of contemporary and historical characters who are inexorably linked to the land of Israel/Palestine," she said. "Sometime during the process of creating this book, I knew that I wanted to create a performance version based on the text. I wasn't sure what it would look like, but I knew it would be collaborative and somehow address the question: 'How can two narratives exist in one body?' When I found out I'd won the Whitman, I decided that rather than have a traditional book release party, I would create a performance piece with dancers and musicians addressing that question."
The piece premiered at a standing-room-only event that also included a silent art auction to benefit Just Vision, a nonprofit organization that promotes social justice in Israel and Palestine. A selection from the performance is featured in the video below.
[This article has been updated. An earlier version of this article failed to mention the sponsor for the Walt Whitman Award. The prize is given annually by the Academy of American Poets.]
