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Poet Joshua Clover and eleven students may face jail for taking part in a bank protest at UC Davis; Stephan Lee pitches a writing competition as a new reality show; Open Culture gathered over four hundred free audio books, including works by Conrad, Poe, and Wharton; and other news.
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.
