Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:
For those who have resolved to write more in the new year, the Guardian rounds up writing tips from ten writers [2], including Zadie Smith’s advice to get off the Internet and Muriel Spark’s suggestion to get a cat.
For more writing tips and inspiration, check out Writers Recommend [3], our weekly column in which writers share the books, art, habits, and processes that get them writing.
The Richard Avedon Foundation has called on publisher Spiegel & Grau to withdraw its book Avedon: Something Personal [4], asserting that the book is full of errors. Written by Norma Stevens, Avedon’s longtime studio director and business manager, the book is part biography, part memoir, and part oral history (New York Times)
Rand Richards Cooper checks in with Walter Minton, the former president of G. P. Putnam’s Sons [5], who published Nabokov’s Lolita and Mailer’s The Deer Park after no other publisher would. (New Yorker)
Rupi Kaur talks with PBS NewsHour [6] about her poetry, and being labeled the “Instagram Poet.” “To be completely honest, I’m not OK with it. A lot of the readers are young women who are experiencing really real things, and they’re not able to talk about it with maybe family or other friends…. And so, when you use that term, you invalidate this space they use to heal and feel closer to one another.”
From Milo Yiannopoulos’s canceled book deal to American libraries working together to fight Trump’s proposed budget cuts, Publishers Weekly looks back on the year’s biggest stories in the literary world [7].
“On the whole, 2017 was not a great year for the English language. Reality is running ahead of our vocabulary.” Louis Menand considers the words of the year put forth by various dictionaries and argues a single word cannot encapsulate 2017 [8]. (New Yorker)
To read more about how Merriam-Webster determines the word of the year, read a Q&A with editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski [9] from the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“We’re writing into the void, and we’re not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conversation or a letter, mean the world.” Poet Mary Jo Salter talks about the joys of being a poet [10] and her latest collection, The Surveyors. (Rumpus)