The novelist Julie Schumacher wrote her latest, Dear Committee Members, entirely in the form of letters of recommendation. The format allowed her to illustrate the travails of a creative writing professor through a medium often ignored in fiction. At The Awl, Jessica Gross and Merve Emre talk about the novel. Pair with: Cathy Day on academia’s novel crisis.
Just a Formality
Regarding the Pain of Others
Can confessional writing be literary? Kelly Sundberg writes, “When I sit down to write literary writing about my trauma, I am a writer first, and a trauma survivor second, but I am not ever not a trauma survivor, and as such, I am often interested in examining the roots and effects of my own trauma.”
●
●
The Cancer of Culture, the Culture of Cancer
Citizen author Claudia Rankine has announced that her next book will be on the culture of cancer. “I’m interested in being in a restaurant and wondering about eating a steak and if it’s hormone-injected and eating it anyway," she said.
●
●