To kick off South Florida’s O, Miami poetry festival (which I’ve written about before), event organizers and WLRN staffers are asking local residents to snap photos of “a place in South Florida that means something to [them],” and “write a short poem about it including the phrase ‘this is where.’” Then, share the poems and photos on Twitter or Instagram for a chance to be featured throughout the month of April. Meanwhile, the New York Times is on it.
#ThisIsWhere The Sun Bakes Our Chancletas
Homes for Old Kindles
Tired of that ancient Kindle sitting around, gathering dust? Now you can trade it in.
A Supposedly Fun Thing We Aren’t Sure About
David Foster Wallace has become an American legend in his own right, so it makes sense that he’ll be coming to the big screen soon. Jason Segel will play the famous writer in an adaptation of David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself with Jesse Eisenberg as Lispky. Can one movie handle this much neurosis?
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Artistic Solitude
“I used to run cross country in high school and it was like, I knew if I put in a certain kind of training, it was going to make me faster. If X, then Y. But with writing, it’s like, if X, if I do this thing that’s necessary, which is giving myself the space and time, then what? It’s sort of a question mark. You have no idea. You work so hard to offer yourself up to the space of the unknown.” Leslie Jamison (and Angela Flournoy and Katherine Towler) on being alone and setting aside the time to write.
This Isn’t Your Mother’s DoubleX
The debut issue of Candor magazine is like a Sassy for the intellectual set, rife with wit (Emily Gould and Merisa Meltzer discuss Away We Go), intelligence (writer mother Rachel Zucker and woman writer Sarah Manguso speak candidly about identity, motherhood, women’s prejudices and writing), and women’s rights (Atossa Abrahamian considers the rhetoric of the rape victim).
We at the Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn
The Oxford American has made True Grit author Charles Portis’s “Motel Life, Lower Reaches” available online for the first time. The piece first appeared in an OA issue from 2003, and it’s also available in Escape Velocity, but you should still read it because it’s Charles Portis, damn it, and you’ve only one life to live in this world. (Related: Hobart just published their “Hotel Culture” issue, which is also worth your time.)
Statements of the Union
The President gave his final State of the Union address on Tuesday night. McSweeney’s shares with us some talking points that have been cut from SOTU addresses over the years.
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Writing is excessive drudgery.
Over on the Atlantic there’s a compendium of cheeky marginalia Monks and their scribes have scribbled into gilded manuscripts, courtesey of Lapham’s Quarterly.
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