“Our culture has focused so much attention on the most visible members of the Black Panthers that it has been easy to forget it was a nationwide organization — an entity that needed to attract ordinary people who believed in something and were also willing to work for it.” In the Times, Rembert Browne reviews two new books about the Black Power movement.
Rise Up
AWP Anxiety
Don’t let social anxiety trap you in your hotel room at AWP. At Tin House, Courtney Maum gives advice for how to make and keep your writer friends in an essay aptly titled, “How Not to Hate Your Friends.” Her first wise tip: “Only be friends with people you actually like.” Pair with: Our dispatch from AWP 2013 to know what you’re in for.
Occupy Writers
Scores of authors have banded behind the Occupy movements via the (intermittently overloaded) site OccupyWriters.com. Among them is Lemony Snicket, who’s penned thirteen observations about the protestors (kindly mirrored by Neil Gaiman).
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Writing About Oneself
Recommended Reading: Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti discuss literary ambition and the price of success.
Risen
In Ireland, Easter is a holiday with great historical significance, thanks to the eponymous uprising that took place in Dublin in 1916. W.B. Yeats lived a short distance away from the spot where the uprising began. Compelled to write about the event, Yeats produced one of his most famous poems, the genius of which is analyzed here by Brett Beasleyin. You could also read Matt Kavanagh on Irish financial fiction after 2008.
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Boy, Girl, Book?
Is the practice of using writing as a metaphor for birth, or birth as a metaphor for writing, in need of an overhaul? Stephanie Feldman for Electric Literature has some strong opinions on the subject. Motherhood on the brain, now? Check out this moving essay for The Millions on mothers and sons by Rachel Basch.
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