“You’ll engage with your advisor in a free-form dialogue about essential skills such as plotting your next career, pacing your financial ruin, structuring TV binge-watching during optimal writing hours, and characterizing all of this as ‘learning how to fail.'” Hey, this new low-competency MFA from the fictitious Half Mast College sounds pretty great. Here’s our own Hannah Gersen on why she has foregone the MFA route entirely.
Show Up, Don’t Show Up
Pirates Write Books Too
Actor Mackenzie Crook (think tall, gangly pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean) tells Telegraph WordUp! Festival that writing his first children’s book, The Windvale Sprites, was the most nerve-wracking test of his career.
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Don’t Mess with Shakespeare
“Last week, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that it had commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. The backlash began immediately.” The New Yorker on why we don’t change Shakespeare’s language. You could also check out our traditional and modern readings of Shakespeare.
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No-Bull Bourbon Reviews
It’s about an hour away from 5 o’clock over here, so that gives you plenty of time to read Chris Newgent’s “No-Bull Bourbon Review” on Hobart’s website. “A true bourbon,” Newgent writes, “is a bourbon with a story worth remembering.” Agreed. And so would Walker Percy.
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MIT’s Open Documentary Lab
Andrew Phelps interviews Sarah Wolzin, director of MIT’s new Open Documentary Lab, which “brings technologists, storytellers, and scholars together to advance the new arts of documentary.” The Lab, according to Phelps, is “part think tank, part incubator for filmmakers and hackers.”
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The Underground Railroad: The Series
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins plans to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad as a limited-run series. In his review of the novel for our site last year, Greg Walklin gushed that “Whitehead’s brilliance is on constant display.”