“[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
Thursday Links
The Rake is at it again, taking The Believer down a peg.Adventures in niche publishing: A new Paris Review?Simon at Bloggasm considers Harriet Klausner, the widely reviled #1 reviewer at Amazon.And, finally, some spot-on humor at the New Yorker this week.
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Hinchas Nuevos
Hinchas de Poesía, which is “a digital codex of contemporary Pan-American writing,” has just released their 11th issue, and it’s certainly worth checking out.
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“Divergents threaten the system.”
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All The Single Horse Flies
Blue Ivy was the one who made the headlines, but she’s not the only Beyoncé Knowles story this week. Australian researcher Bryan Lessard has paid tribute to the singer by incorporating her name into the binomial nomenclature of an extremely rare horse fly. When asked why he did this, Lennard responded that the fly’s gold-colored abdomen made it “the all time diva of flies.”
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RIP Jenny Diski
Jenny Diski, a prolific author who’d kept up a serialized diary of living with cancer since 2014, died this morning at the age of 68. Her partner, Ian Patterson, broke the news on Twitter, after which outlets including The Guardian confirmed it. The author had recently published her final book, a memoir.
All Stories Are Stories
Last week, I directed you to a piece in The Atlantic by John Yorke on the substance of stories. His argument: that all stories have one thing in common–their plot. Now, Lincoln Michel at Electric Literature suggests that rather it is all story structure models that have one thing in common–and that thing is bullshit.
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The new Brooklyn novel
“Like characters in a somewhat less swashbuckling Jack London novel, these are all characters, and writers, who are grappling with their environments.” Our own Lydia Kiesling writes for Salon about the “caucasian, Ivy-educated writers of literary fiction set in Brooklyn” and the novels they’re producing, particularly the just-released-yesterday Friendship by Emily Gould.
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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…