Several people sidelined by the Hollywood writers strike said they are penning children’s tales to pass the time while they wait to go back to work.
“It’s kind of a nice way to do something creative at a time when we’re having a hard time doing our bread-and-butter work,” David N. Weiss, a Rugrats writer and WGA official, who recently turned in a first draft of the children’s book Carl the Frog, told The Hollywood Reporter.
The UPI piece goes on to name two other upcoming kids’ books by writers for That’s So Raven and Comedy Central’s The Root of All Evil, but since all three books are being published by the same company – Worthwhile Books, a new imprint of the ultra-corporate entertainment company IDT/IDW – it’s maybe a bit misleading to imply that this is a widespread new trend.
November 13, 2007 | 5:51 PM | By Leigh Anne Williams
Q&Q is doing some informal research on the best day jobs for authors. What jobs provide the most flexible schedules to accommodate creative writing? What jobs provide the best raw material or inspiration for fiction?
So, this is a call-out to authors: please comment and tell us about your best day job ever, then stay tuned for our report.
August 29, 2007 | 11:59 AM | By Leigh Anne Williams
MtvU, a branch of MTV that broadcasts on 750 U.S. college campuses, announced this week that it has chosen its first poet laureate, The New York Times reports. And while names such as Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen spring to mind as poets already in the music world, mtvU chose John Ashbery, a celebrated 80-year-old poet who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and continues to publish prolifically.
Excerpts of Ashbery’s poems will be shown in 18 promotional spots on the channel and its website (which will also have the full text of the poems).
Mr. Ashbery, who was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, was immediately receptive. “It seemed like it would be a chance to broaden the audience for poetry,” he said.
The poems used in the campaign span his career, and the spots are simple: on a white background, black text floats in to a sound like a crashing wave, appears on the screen for a minute, then floats away. From “Retro” (2005): “It’s really quite a thrill/When the moon rises over the hill/and you’ve gotten over someone/salty and mercurial, the only person you’ve ever loved.” From “Soonest Mended” (2000): “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/In our technological society, we are always having to be rescued.”
The station is also sponsoring a poetry contest for students. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa will select a winner, who will have a book published next year by HarperCollins as part of its national poetry series.
“We hope that we’ll help discover the next great poet that we’ll be talking about for years to come,” said Stephen K. Friedman, the general manager of mtvU….
Quillblog suggests keeping quiet about the fact that there is significantly less bling involved in being a poetry star than a rock star.
According to The Guardian, a new poll has revealed that Britons want to be writers more than they want to be anything else.
A YouGov poll has found that almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an author, followed by sports personality, pilot, astronaut and event organiser on the list of most coveted jobs.
The Guardian speculates that this surge in literary interest is due mostly to J.K. Rowling, who is generally perceived to have made gobs and gobs of money by simply scribbling away in cafes over cups of tea. Judging by the fairytale content of the rest of the preferred professions list – which essentially amounts to playing sports, flying, and throwing parties – it seems that Britons are actually just saying that they don’t want to work for a living at all. Which is understandable enough.
However, according to our calculations, if all the wannabes follow their dreams, Britain will soon have 6 million authors storming the doors of the nation’s publishing houses. Good luck to ‘em, we say.
Meanwhile, The Guardian has also posted the results of yet another poll, this one from the U.S., which found that a quarter of Americans read no books whatsoever last year. And of those who did, the average tally was four books, with the Bible and romance novels named as the top picks. So we’re guessing that “writer” would not beat out pop idol, motivational speaker, and heiress as the preferred professions in the U.S., but hey – different country, different dreams.
August 14, 2007 | 11:29 AM | By Megan Grittani-Livingston
How many aspiring authors are there are among the 30,000-plus employees of the Borders U.S. chain? Quillblog guesses a lot, and it looks as though Borders does too: the chain has announced it will publish a novel by one of its shelf-stackers, the winner of a contest that closes on Jan. 31, 2008.
Do you think the winning manuscript will be an angst-filled tale of a life stalled in a dead-end job until something wacky or earth-shattering happens? Nah, Quillblog doesn’t either.
A murder trial currently under way in Poland suggests that there is definitely such a thing as too much author research. The defendant, according to an article in The Guardian, is 33-year-old writer Krystian Bala, and police say his popular novel Amok mirrors the facts of a real-life killing much too closely to be coincidence.
In Amok, Bala describes how the man was tied up in a similar fashion to [the victim] Dariusz J, with his hands bound behind his back and round his wrists and neck. The murdered man, the owner of a small advertising agency, had also been tortured.
Bala has vigorously denied having inside knowledge of the killing. He says he was simply an avid reader of the press reports and that he has been framed to cover up for what he described as a “bungled” police investigation.
It sounded like a tenuous accusation to us at first, but then the Guardian piece goes on to mention that the victim was a close friend of Bala’s ex-wife, and that, four days after the murder, Bala sold the victim’s mobile phone over the internet. Creepy.
Authors: do you sometimes worry about employing excessively salty language? Do you fret about offending readers with your otherwise innocent descriptors? Don’t you wish there was a way of determining once and for all the words that amuse and the words that affront?
Well now there is! The friendly people at Random House Reference have devised a revolutionary – and handy! – chart for just such a purpose, called the O.Q., or the Offensiveness Quotient. As they state on their website:
When we label sensitive terms for Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, there are a lot of factors to consider. The way we decide has to do with how offensive a word is (the degree to which a word offends the person it is used to describe) and how disparaging a word is (the degree to which the person who uses the word intends for it to be hurtful).
To decide how to label a word, we go through a process that is something like the chart we give below. We call it the O.Q., or “offensiveness quotient” – modeled after the more familiar I.Q. (Intelligence Quotient). […] Basically, the O.Q. is the average of a term’s rank on the scales of Disparagement and Offensiveness.
Thanks to the O.Q. chart, we here at Q&Q now know that while it is not particularly desirable to refer to someone of the feminine persuasion as “the little woman,” it is still preferable to referring to her as “baby.” Similarly, calling someone of European descent a “honky” is worse than calling them “whitey,” but not nearly as bad as calling them “cracker.” We’re not exactly sure how “spaz” can be considered more slanderous than “harelip,” but then, who are we to question such a finely honed system?
Inspired by a recent documentary called Helvetica, about the now-ubiquitous 50-year-old font, Slateasked a bunch of prominent authors to tell them what fonts they compose in, and why. Not one of the authors named Helvetica, which is not surprising, considering how crappy it looks on a typical PC. What is surprising is that one of the crappiest of all fonts – Courier – got plenty of love, with five of the 10 author respondents naming it or one of its variations as their favorite.
Author Andrew Vacchs supplies a fairly convincing argument for Courier, though:
I write everything in Courier 12, because I write for publication, not pleasure. Since I cannot control the font the (eventual) publisher selects, what do I care how it looks on my screen? Courier 12 is the Type-O blood of fonts—works just as good for a N.Y. Times op-ed as a screenplay or a short story.
Judging by the full array of author comments, it appears that writing with Courier is like writing in an empty white room with no windows: all that’s left is you and the words. Still, do writers really need to act like monks in an abbey? Why not try some Big Caslon once in awhile, with a sprinkling of Zapf Dingbats?
Bookninja has posted a lengthy conversation between authors (and good friends) Lynn Coady and Christy Ann Conlin, in which they debate the pros and cons of writing about a place you’ve never lived in yourself. Because they’re both from Nova Scotia, they talk a lot about Maritime-set novels by non-Maritime authors, like Scotch River by Linda Little and The Wind Seller by Rachael Preston.
CONLIN: I opened [Little’s] book with that bristling sense of territorialism we’re talking about. But her book was great. It transcends place and culture. It’s bigger than that. She does nail contemporary Nova Scotian culture as though she’s from here. […] It makes me think of Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski who we know as Joseph Conrad. He didn’t even speak English until he was sixteen and then he didn’t even publish a novel, god bless him, until he was in his mid thirties. And he is considered to be a fine English novelist. He adopted English culture and I think he was able to see into the heart of it, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, in a way few from England could.
Then Coady turns the conversation around and begins to wonder if it isn’t harder to write about a place that you lived in.
COADY: This is a whole other problem: the feeling that, as a local writer you are somehow complicit in the construction of a twee, fakey stereotype simply by having written what you know best. Then the meanies in Toronto make fun of books set on the east coast for being full of caricatured, kilt-wearing alcoholic fisherman and you remember your last novel and think, Oh shit. Then the phone rings and it’s your drunk uncle Pete slurring something about how he dropped his sporrin over the side of the lobster boat.
The conversation starts off kind of draggy but gets a lot more interesting and lively in the second half, so Quillblog recommends skimming their lengthy opening exchanges and reading from there.
In the wake of the massacre at Virginia Tech this week, Salon has posted a fascinating article about what creative writing professors should do when confronted with disturbing works by students. As has been widely reported, the perpetrator of the massacre, Cho Seung-Hui, wrote several scripts for his playwriting class that deeply alarmed the school’s English department faculty. Now, a lot of media pundits are questioning whether faculty could have done more to get Seung-Hui some medical treatment.
But this opens the door to a lot of potential problems, of course, the chief one being that creativity and freedom of speech could be trampled on.
Creative writing teachers have long wrestled with what they should do with students who turn in gruesome stories, as many colleges do not have formal policies about how teachers should respond. Further, there are no set rules for determining whether a story is the product of a febrile artistic imagination or a potentially violent criminal. Or both.
[…]
Creative writing teachers still have to rely on their own imprecise judgment, especially in classes where students may be encouraged to write with intense emotion. What may be one student’s cause for concern may be another’s catharsis, says Michelle Carter, [professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University]. “Sometimes working through rage in that way can be healthy,” she says.
Matrix magazine’s newest issue features a 30-page tribute to poet and professor Robert Allen, who died last November from brain cancer. Allen was the editor of Matrix for a decade, working out of his office in Concordia University’s creative writing department.
Matrix’s tribute features prose, poetry, and photography from Golda Fried, David Solway, Anne Stone, Conundrum Press’s Andy Brown (who is also Matrix’s art director), current editor Jon Paul Fiorentino, and more. It also features previously unpublished poetry by Allen.
Nearly everyone has a bad Valentine’s Day story – and there are undoubtedly a few more out there after yesterday – but few can top Salman Rushdie’s. The Ayatollah Khomeini’s murderous fatwa against the author came down on this particular Hallmark holiday back in 1989.
Now, though, it’s already been close to 10 years since Rushdie came out of hiding (after the Iranian government withdrew the fatwa), and this year Rushdie celebrated Valentine’s Day by doing something new: starting a gig as a world literature lecturer at Emory University in Atlanta. According to a CBC Arts/Associated Press story, “Rushdie will teach more than a dozen Emory graduate students in a weekly literature seminar. He is also scheduled to host a public lecture later in February.” The university is now also the holder of his literary archives.
And how did the school attract its new star professor? Very easily, apparently. “Because they asked me and nobody else ever had,” says Rushdie.
And he’s not the only literary giant breaking into the teaching racket. As The Guardian reports, Rushdie’s friend Martin Amis is becoming a creative writing prof at Manchester University. It’s hard to imagine Amis suffering patiently through typical, competently mediocre student work, but he insists that he’ll be kind to his pupils: “I may be acerbic in how I write but I’m not how I live. And I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to people in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I’ll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them.”
This past Sunday, Book Television started airing its reality series, 3-Day Novel Contest. Indigo and Book Television teamed up to produce the eight-part program, which follows 12 contestants as they live and write for the annual writing contest in Edmonton’s largest Chapters over the Labour Day long weekend. Kim Clarke Champniss acts as host, while judges Todd Babiak, Minister Faust, and Jenn Farrell run the 12 contestants through challenges such as a spelling bee.
None of the reality contestants won the official 3-Day Novel Contest (that honour went to Brendan McLeod for The Convictions of Leonard McKinley) but the reality series winner will have an excerpt published in Westword, an Alberta writing magazine, and the author will receive a week-long mentorship at a writers’ retreat.
The 3-Day Novel Contest began in 1977 and occurs every Labour Day weekend. Participants must produce a new novel in 72 hours. McLeod’s will be published under the 3-Day Books imprint and distributed by Arsenal Pulp Press through Jaguar Book Group in Canada and Consortium Book Sales and Distribution in the U.S. in early August.
As reported in yesterday’s The Globe and Mail print edition, 50 Cent, the multi-platinum selling rapper, wants to get young African American men interested in reading. (The article is available for purchase online or free to subscribers.) 50 Cent, real name Curtis James Jackson III, officially launched his G-Unit Books, an imprint of Pocket Books/MTV Books, today. While his contribution to the writing seems to be limited to brainstorming sessions with the actual authors, 50 Cent’s lifestyle is still the key attraction of the books.
While the purpose, according to Louise Bruke, the executive vice-president and publisher of Pocket Books, is to increase literacy, many people are concerned about the books’ message, which follows the glamorization of violence, drugs and sex found in the rapper’s songs. So when trying to attract new readers, what is more important: quality content or continuing interest?
September 1, 2006 | 12:00 AM | By Leigh Anne Williams
It’s reality TV, but it’s fiction. Many would argue that all reality television is fiction, but in this case, the digital channel BookTelevision plans to film and broadcast the writing of fiction. The typical writer working on a novel over the course of a year, with hours at a computer broken only by fidgeting, eating, coffee-making, trips to the refrigerator, and the occasional neurotic breakdown might not make for dramatic television viewing, but the frantic activity of the 3-Day Novel Contest sounds more like reality TV fodder.
According to The Tyee’s embedded reporter and contestant, Ron Yamauchi, the “72-hour marathon is a furious disgorgement of words and used caffeine that has taken place annually since 1977,” reportedly having been created when “a number of competitive, ambitious, drink-sodden Vancouver writers developed the format as a form of dare.”
Yamauchi says BookTelevision is producing and presenting the contest updates every couple of hours via the Internet over the Labour Day weekend and plans to televise a documentary in October. “Twelve selected competitors are being ensconced in aquarium-like conditions in a Chapters store in Edmonton, hooked into word processors and occasionally pitted in mini-games, all of it hosted by Kim Clarke Champniss.” Kind of makes the long years of writing a regular novel in solitude sound better.
Francine Prose, whom Quillblog likes a lot, has a new book out called Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. There’s an online-only Q&A with Prose up over at the Atlantic website, and it includes some choice comments on the age-old (well, couple-decades-old) question of whether formalized creative-writing programs do more good or harm. Says Prose: “One of the things I do when I’m teaching a literature class to MFA students—and I much prefer teaching a literature class to a writing workshop—is make up a reading list based on masterpieces that would just wither and die in a workshop setting. Things like Beckett’s First Love or Metamorphosis. The list is endless.”
And on whether she’d recommend the workshop route for budding young writers: “I’ll tell you quite frankly what I would advise: if you’re getting money or some kind of scholarship, I would go without a question, because it gives you two years to write. That’s two years where you don’t have to wait tables; two years to take your work seriously. And if you’re really gifted, it’s pretty hard to lose that in the course of a workshop. On the other hand—and perhaps I shouldn’t say this because so many of my friends, and I myself at many points, have been so dependent on workshops for making a living—if you’re going to spend two years and come out the other end $80,000 in the hole, I’d think a million times before doing it.”
In Other Media probably isn’t the place for this, but it makes fun of David Caruso’s tremendously cheesy performance on CSI: Miami, which is the most hilariously over-the-top acting just about anywhere. And it’s from McSweeney’s, so that’s book-related, right? (To ensure there is some direct book-content in this post, check out the other link to another McSweeney’s piece that imagines the feedback Joyce would have received had he submitted Ulysses in a creative writing workshop.)
The premise of Brian Graham’s piece about Caruso is summed up in the title: “David Caruso Scolds His Cat About Its Lackadaisical Litter-Box Use.” Writes Graham, in the voice of Caruso’s character Lieutenant Horatio Caine: “You can purr all you like, but I know that the purr is a lie. I trusted you to use the litter box. The rule was clear and indisputable, and yet you broke it. Again and again. Right on the kitchen floor.”
In Edinburgh, Scotland, where unemployment has risen to over 18% and 23% of households fall under the low-income threshold, stability has been found in a somewhat unlikely place: a local library. Turning young, rambunctious patrons of the Sighthill library into respectful, law-abiding citizens was a matter of talking to regulars, taking stock of their needs, and addressing them.
Now offering a range of new programs and facilities — everything from a football literacy project to IT classes and creative writing courses held by guest authors like Irvine Welsh — the library may have contributed to some astonishing changes. Reports Peter Hetherington of The Guardian, “Since introducing the new regime, police have reported a two-thirds drop in the number of ‘youth calls’ in the [surrounding] area between 2004 and 2005. At the same time, complaints from library customers over anti-social behaviour have dropped by three-quarters.” And with some of the techniques used at the library being tried out in over two dozen other locations across Edinburgh, Sighthill library administrators were the recent recipients of a prestigious ‘libraries change lives’ award given by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals at a ceremony in Birmingham.
Sam Sacks of the New York Press takes a stab at that educational institution we all love to hate: the graduate-level writing workshop. The importance of workshops in contemporary American literature can be seen both in their ubiquity (with almost every American state possessing at least one school that can grant an MFA in writing) and in the increasing “common-sense” notion, held by swelling factions that include publishers, that writing schools are to a life of writing what universities are to careers: a necessary first step.
But assessing the yields of the “best” of America’s writing programs, as collected in an anthology, Best New American Voices 2006, Sacks finds the stories dull and formulaic and suggests that the creative writing education system is at fault. According to Sacks, the notion of creative tutelage has strayed far from the mentor-protégé relationships enjoyed by Stein and Hemingway, Tolstoy and Chekhov, and Flaubert and de Maupassant, to “large, impersonal, ever-shuffling workshops … led by authors of, on average, mediocre ability who throw only a part of their energy into helping their students. The result of all this is as predictable as it was inevitable: writing is taught by rote.” Another related result is a rule-oriented, lowest-common-denominator approach to teaching, whereby all students, even ones with potential, are treated as mediocre for the simple fact that most students are mediocre. The result, argues Sacks, is that programs cater to mediocrity and discourage daring as both irregular and impractical.
An interview with British author A.L. Kennedy on the Huffington Post website lays to rest any illusions aspiring literary fiction writers may have about the life awaiting them should they ever get their work published. Kennedy is blunt and funny in her assessment of the writing life. On the state of publishing: “Fewer publishing houses concentrated in conglomerate hands trying to produce more books of less quality. No full time readers, no full time copy editors and therefore missed newcomers and piss-poor final presentation of texts on the shelves, silly covers, greedy and simple-minded bookshop chains, lunatic bidding wars designed to crush the spirit of unknown newcomers….”
And then there’s the glamorous life of the jet-setting novelist: “Endless community halls and libraries, immensely tiring tours of places that might be interesting if you ever got to see them, food you can’t eat, or never get, not enough sleep, crushing isolation, little or no chance of a cup of tea on the road, endless working to subsidise the writing.”
Following the recent death of Frank Conroy, novelist Lan Samantha Chang is taking over as the director of the venerated Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The New York Times looks at Chang’s plans going into the job and her views on what makes writing classes successful. “I don’t think they should advocate one aesthetic over another,” she says. “I don’t believe in singling out particular people or destroying them in public, though I make my opinions known.” Novelist Marilynne Robinson, who was on the hiring committee, tells the Times that Chang beat out Jim Shepard, Ben Marcus, and Richard Bausch for the job. “We felt we couldn’t go wrong choosing any of the candidates,” says Robinson, who then seems to suggest that one plus for Chang’s case was that “her career [as a novelist] is on the upswing.” Ouch.
CBC Arts looks back at the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. There is, of course, a strong emphasis on the commercial glory days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Eden Robinson, Annabel Lyon, Steven Galloway, and Nancy Lee, among countless other UBC MFA grads, went on to find fame and fortune (on the CanLit scale, at least). “[N]early half the graduating class of 2001 finished school with a book contract,” notes the writer of the CBC Arts piece, writer Greg Buium. The more recent sharp downturn in the market for first-time fiction gets much less play in the story, though agent Denise Bukowski is quoted as saying, “It’s very hard to convince the media that fiction isn’t what they think it is. Publishers are running scared right now because fiction isn’t selling.”
No one can deny that creative writing programs have become to contemporary literature what the minor leagues are to major sports. Check the bio on the back of almost any novel or story collection by an under-45 author and there will likely be mention of a degree from a well-known creative-writing grad program, where said author now passes on those skills to a new generation of budding scribes. Not everyone is in agreement about whether this is good for literature, though. In an opinion piece for The Guardian, novelist and critic DJ Taylor casts a withering glance at the what he sees as the institutionalization of the novel, concluding that “what the academy has done for English literature in the past two or three decades could be summarised on the back of a small postcard.” Taylor also quotes Paul Magrs, who once taught at the University of East Anglia’s renowned creative writing graduate program, as saying that students in such programs “tend to be people of about 30 who’ve burnt out doing something else, who’ve read some Kundera and some Rushdie and think they’re going to reinvent the European novel by writing about their gap year and Roland Barthes.”
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Matrix magazine’s 
Nearly everyone has a bad Valentine’s Day story – and there are undoubtedly a few more out there after yesterday – but few can top Salman Rushdie’s. The Ayatollah Khomeini’s murderous fatwa against the author came down on this particular Hallmark holiday back in 1989.
