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Thanks to the accessibility of new digital tools offered by booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, self-publishing is loosing its stigma and holds new promise for writers venturing out on their own.
In the midst of the political protests that were escalating in Wisconsin last winter, three library science majors at the University of Wisconsin devised the Library as Incubator Project, a website for writers, artists, and librarians to share their creations and ideas in one collaborative space.
Some details of the legacy late Polish poet Wisława Szymborska hoped to leave writers of the future were revealed yesterday at the opening of her will in Krakow. According to Michal Rusinek, Szymborska's personal secretary, the Nobel Prize-winning poet had called for the establishment of a foundation, among the tasks of which would be to facilitate the creation of a new literary prize.
The nature of the prize was not illustrated in Szymborska's will. The foundation, which will assume care of Szymborska's papers and possessions, will be responsible for determining the type of prize and to whom it might be given.
Szymborska, whose last collection, Here (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), was published in the United States in 2010, died on the first of this month at the age of eighty-eight.
The video below is an animated adaptation of Szymborska's poem "Advertisement," translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanaugh.
Publication statistics for 2011 have been compiled and released by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts; the Paris Review Daily looks at the twenty-five year friendship between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson; Filmmaker Scott Teems remembers his friend and collaborator, the novelist William Gay; and other news.
This animated film for Betsy Wheeler's poetry collection Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room (National Poetry Review Press, 2012) features art and animation by Luca Depierro and music by Stephen Barnard.
Write a list titled "The Ten Things I Will Not Think About in My Last Seconds of Life." Give yourself ten minutes to freewrite the list, then turn the list into an essay. It can be funny, serious, or strange; the points may be connected or not. The important part is to allow yourself to linger on each item in your list and let it grow into its full potential, perhaps keeping it mind for an essay of its own. For this assignment, make sure to incorporate all ten things from the list into your essay.
Write a story in which a character lives alone in a desolate environment—the woods, the desert, the mountains. Describe your character going about the day, and use that action as a backdrop for revealing the reason why he or she has chosen to retreat from the world. Then, have another character enter the scene, describing how he or she arrives. What happens next?
The Big Think examines how new generations of readers respond to J. D. Salinger's infamous Holden Caulfield; the Examiner reports of a shake-up at the Columbia College Chicago writing program; Dinty W. Moore weighs in on the controversy surrounding John D’Agata; and other news.
Oh, look: Poet, novelist, nonfiction writer, and editor Ander Monson appears to be reading "For Orts," a poem from The Available World (Sarabande Books, 2010), in a refrigerator. In a tiger costume.
Channel a person you've lost in your life. Find a photograph or reflect on a mental image of a friend or relative who is no longer part of your everyday life (because of death, estrangement, physical distance) and reenter the moment of that image, examining the clothing, the facial expression, the nuances of the scene in which the subject is situated. Then go deeper, into the scents, the temperature of the air, the physical and emotional sensations related to this particular scene from a past life. Now write down any words evoked by this reflection, whether they form a narrative or are entirely associative, whether they come from the point of view of an observer or the person herself. Use this material you've created to write a poem (you might try writing it in the form of a letter to your loved one, or from her to you).
