“[A]ny discussion of craft does not take place in a vacuum – that race is part of one’s lived experience and how we see ourselves and are seen does impact how and what we write.” Poet Neil Aiken puts together an absolutely indispensable list of texts – books, essays, lectures and beyond – on the craft of writing by writers of color. See also: our own Edan Lepucki‘s impromptu syllabus of craft readings.
On Craft and Color
Write Across America
The folks at Write By Night are embarking on a quest to organize State Writing Resources (“from conferences to local critique groups to literary magazines”) for all fifty states in our nation. The first two destinations on the docket? Alabama and Alaska, respectively.
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The Character of the Characters
Graphic designer Matthew Olin sculpts eight superheros out of letters in imagining the personalities of different fonts. Sadly, he leaves us wondering how one would personify our old pal Comic Sans.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Adler; Smith; Harris; Margolin; Hall; Mailer; Saramago
Out this week: The Wall by H.G. Adler; How to Be Both by Ali Smith; Screenplay by MacDonald Harris; Woman with a Gun by Phillip Margolin; Essays after Eighty by Donald Hall; Selected Letters by Norman Mailer; and Skylight by the late Nobel laureate José Saramago. For more on these and other recent titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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We hold these truths to be self-evident.
A “typo” in the Declaration of Independence has been contributing to “a routine but serious misunderstanding” of the document, says researcher Danielle Allen.
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“Perhaps James Franco should just stick to acting.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” said Guy Fieri, as he read the New York Times’s review of James Franco’s photography exhibit. “Their review of my restaurant is no longer the most gleefully negative thing they’ve published.”
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Courtney Zoffness Puts Messiness on Display
Courtney Zoffness discusses her book, Spilt Milk, and how writing it was an exercise in embracing uncertainty.
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““[A]ny discussion of craft does not take place in a vacuum – that race is part of one’s lived experience and how we see ourselves and are seen does impact how and what we write.”
Subject matter has nothing to do with craft; issues of craft are identical across the total range of possible author-identities. Craft (its demands; its value judgments, et al) will vary according to language, possibly, and era, possibly, but not, correcting for the other variables, according to gender, age or race. Projecting Race as a factor, where it is supremely irrelevant, is one of the troubling manias of the Era, as though we can, somehow, make up for failures in Politics, Economics or Sociology by concentrating all of the serious conversations about Race that we *aren’t* having, under those three headings, where they will trouble us the least: in (eg) Literary Criticism. On the level of Literary Quality, the age/color/gender of the author is an irrelevant distraction. Authorial biography is already too intrusive, regarding Literary Fiction, and Identity Politics only serve to weaponize the problem.
If a “Writing Consultant” advertized his/her services as a *White* (or Asian or Native American, and so forth) practitioner, my reaction would be to steer clear, to say the least.
What are the best books on Literary Craft? That’s all we need to know. We need to stop with the Positive Segregation, no matter how appropriate to the Era it may feel at the time…