Lynn Shawcroft is comedian Mitch Hedberg’s widow, and she curates MitchHedberg.net. In a series of tweets this week, Shawcroft alluded to the possibility that she’ll be releasing Hedberg’s notebooks in the near future, perhaps as part of a book. Of course some excerpts from Hedberg’s notebooks are already available online, such as this fantastic sketch which explains the trouble with mingling before a comedy set.
Possible Release of Mitch Hedberg’s Notebooks
Hannah Horvath is headed to Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. Or is she?
Samantha Chang, the director of Iowa’s Writing Workshop, weighed in on the Girls storyline in which Lena Dunham’s character gets accepted into the school’s MFA program. “It’s very possible that she could have gotten in,” Chang says of Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s character. Meanwhile, University of Iowa officials have apparently denied the HBO show’s request to film on-campus for its next season.
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It’s Not Nothing
We’ve published a fair number of essays about the writing process and its discontents. In Bookforum, Anne Boyer tackles the natural complement to literary work, in an excerpt of her new Garments Against Women. Her subject? The art of not writing.
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The Iowa Writers’ Workshop Turns 75
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop turns 75 this year. To celebrate, a number of alumni are writing essays on their experiences for various blogs (as well as ours!) as part of The 75th Project. At The Los Angeles Review of Books, Kevin Brockmeier has comprised “A Chronological List of Statements People Made to Me at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1995-1997.” Additionally, Joyelle McSweeney has a piece on n+1‘s website entitled “Iowa Occult: a Mütter Pedagogy; Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Vomit Art.”
“How I Read”
“We all read from different places, different backgrounds, and my meeting with Proust or Woolf, or Lydia Davis or J. M. Coetzee, will not be yours, nor should it be. On the other hand I do believe reading is an active skill, an art even, certainly not a question of passive absorption. … [so] there must be techniques and tools that everyone can use or try, even if we use them differently.” Tim Parks explains how he reads for The New York Review of Books.
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They’re Not Rocks
“I have this belief that you have to save at least half of your crucial experiences. The ones that are crystalline. The ones that you always can recall. And you recall that every detail—what actors call a sense impression. You remember how things smelled, what they felt like, how you felt at the moment. You remember every single last part of this episode, or moment in your life.” This interview with Norman Mailer from The Paris Review never actually made it to print, which makes it all the more fascinating.
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Gigantic’s Giants
The latest issue of Gigantic–featuring interviews with Lynne Tillman and Gordon Lish, and fiction by Diane Williams, John Haskell, and Kim Chinquee–lives up to its name in content in spite of its portable (i.e. subway-friendly) size.
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National Literary Ambassadors in the New York Times
The New York Times interviews Jacqueline Woodson, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and Tracy K. Smith, poet laureate of the United States for National Poetry Month. They discuss black history, bringing poetry to the central and rural parts of the country and to those who are incarcerated and why poetry isn’t as popular among adults. “Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry — and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.” It’s a delight, happy Saturday!