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New York Magazine solicits volcano poetry from celebrities; jubliat celebrates ten years in print; a rock band puts Paul Celan's Holocaust poetry to music; Random House acquieses on e-book rights for several William Styron titles; and other news.
My boilerplate advice is, subscribe to Poets & Writers.
—Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections: A Novel (FSG, 2001)
BEA announces a major new panel; the judge in the Google Book Settlement gets a promotion; the Academy of American Poets annual gala takes place in New York; today is possibly Shakespeare's birthday; and other news.
Inspired by a rumination on the New York Times Paper Cuts blog that asked whether a blog could ever rise to the level of literature, the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction is asking blog readers and writers to nominate "vibrant new voices with interesting, true stories to tell" for a special issue of the magazine. Specifically, the magazine is looking for entries of literary ("narrative, narrative, narrative") blog posts that were published between November 1, 2009, and March 31 of this year.
The winning essays will be published in the July 2010 issue of Creative Nonfiction and each author will receive a fifty-dollar reward for one-time reprint rights.
Can a blog post transcend the tendency of its kind toward, as Gregory Cowles of Paper Cuts puts it, being "too topical and too fleeting to count as literature"? The deadline for nominations of previously blogged essays—your own, a friend's, a stranger's—totaling no more than two thousand words each is Monday, April 26. More information is available on Creative Nonfiction's Web site.
Barnes & Noble takes the e-reader battle to broadcast television; the FBI is investigating fraud at Naropa University; the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books kicks off on Saturday; Earth Day reflections from a descendant of Henry David Thoreau; and other news.
Book publishers turn to BEA and Frankfurt after the volcano disrupts LBF; another Chinese PEN member is banned from travel; Narrative Magazine develops an iPhone app; a City Lights employee celebrates forty years at the bookshop; and other news.
Acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and short story writer John Edgar Wideman, who made news last month when he announced that his new book of short short stories would be released using the self-publishing outfit Lulu, recently launched a writing contest inspired by the collection, Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind. The author, whose many honors include the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (which he won a history-making two times), a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, and the Rea Award for Excellence in the Short Story, is inviting entries of what he is calling "micro-stories" for possible inclusion in a special edition of his book.
Story entries should be no more than six hundred words, and should be submitted via e-mail to [email protected] by May 1. Wideman will announce the winner, who will also receive a signed copy of the special edition including his or her story, on the Lulu blog on May 14.
"The micro-fictions in my collection are about losing time, saving time, enduring time, fearing and escaping time," Wideman says in an essay that draws parallels between the short short form and the flow of a basketball game. He explains that the act of entering and soon after exiting a story—as if a time-out has been called in a game—allows the reader to "freeze, review, highlight the action. As if you can press a pause button and be released temporarily from the game’s intensity, from time." The complete essay is posted on the Lulu blog.
In the video below, actor Theron Cook reads the story "Bananas" from Briefs.
Emily Dickinson's garden is recreated in the New York Botanical Garden; three nominees emerge for the Oxford poetry professorship; the PEN World Voices Festival gets an iPhone app; Oregon's innovative celebration of National Poetry Month; and other news.
Princeton University and the country of Israel ban iPads; Mark Twain's margin notes can now be perused in Connecticut; George Washington has some overdue library books; Marc Jacobs opens a bookstore; and other news.
I think Dylan Thomas got it right—that when we’re at our best in this art, we lose sight of all agendas (“ambition,” “bread,” “the strut and trade of charms on the ivory stages”) and go alone into the dark to sing for something that isn’t listening. And yet the final step in the process is to connect with readers—and sometimes (as with Thomas) with listeners too. For a poet like me, whose work is full of sound and narration, “taking it on the road” is a good way to see if I’m connecting—and not just with my literary peers.
