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"You have speakers engaged with everything from the purple gonads of moon jellyfish to ancient Egyptian burial rights," says poet and molecular biologist Katherine Larson about her collection Radial Symmetry, winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets, in this recent profile on the PBS NewsHour.
Choose an article from a magazine that profiles a person, such as a celebrity, a political figure, or a professional athlete. Using one of the settings in the article and a fictionalized version of the person as the main character, write a story in which it is revealed that the main character's greatest strength is also his or her greatest failing.
Travel writer, memoirist, and novelist Mary Morris, who teaches a workshop called The Writer and the Wanderer at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, likes to send her students on field trips to light the creative torch. “I like to get my students out of the house, and a little out of their heads,” says Morris, whose most recent book is the memoir River Queen (Holt, 2007). “Go away. Listen. Eavesdrop. Find something new. Bring back a souvenir. What do you take with you? What do you leave behind? Sit outside in one place until a story comes to you.” Follow Morris's guidance: Go on a field trip of your own, and discover the wanderer within you.
Author Francesca Lia Block has taken her mortgage difficulties public; Amazon temporarily lifted its nondisclosure agreement so authors could reveal Kindle Single earnings; James Pogue scrutinizes the Southern mythology surrounding Pulphead author John Jeremiah Sullivan; and other news.
Write a lyric poem titled "Ode to the Girl in the Red Shoes." Read the Poetry Foundation's definition of the ode, for more information.
A breakdown of the potential antitrust lawsuit aimed at Apple and large publishers; Fifty Shades of Grey, a best-selling erotic novel published by a small press in Australia, launched a seven-figure bidding war among the major publishers; poet Charles Bernstein writes that PennSound has made available over one hundred recordings of 1990s-era readings at the Ear Inn in New York City; and other news.
"This man is pretending to be Billy Collins, so call the police!" Check out the former poet laureate in this episode of the children's show Martha Speaks, which will be aired on PBS on April 2 in celebration of National Poetry Month.
The New York Times has more on the Justice Department's potential lawsuit against Apple and several publishers over e-book pricing; Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook, is the new owner of the venerable magazine the New Republic; Reese Witherspoon has purchased the film rights to Cheryl Strayed's memoir, Wild; and other news.
The winners of this year's National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night in New York City. Among the winners was Edith Pearlman, whose fourth collection of stories, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (Lookout Books), had also been nominated for the National Book Award last year, and went on to win the PEN/Malamud Award.
In poetry, Laura Kasischke won for her collection Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press), which recently received the first Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas. Mira Bartók won in autobiography for her memoir, The Memory Palace (Free Press).
Awards were also given in criticism, to Geoff Dyer for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf Press); in biography, to John Lewis Gaddis for George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press); and in general nonfiction, to Maya Jasanoff for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf).
Awards were also given to reviewer Kathryn Schulz, who received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Roberts B. Silvers of the New York Review of Books, who won this year's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
In the video below, Pearlman reads from her winning collection.
