We here at Lit Drift are trying to take a look at how storytelling and literature are changing because of (and in spite of) popular culture.
But when some people talk about storytelling, they mean the oral tradition. Someone standing up in front of a group and talking, motioning with their hands, using facial expressions and sounds, dancing, laughing, relating. I’m increasingly finding myself drawn to this art of storytelling as it existed before all of our contemporary mediums…before radio, before television, before podcasts, before microfiction, before Twitter, before Facebook.
I know we’re called “Storytelling in the 21st Century,” but I guess I keep wanting to write like it’s …1899? Maybe the 21st century of storytelling will start to look a bit like the last century when people get tired of technology and yearn for something more…human. Well, I might not be too far off since it seems that this ancient art of storytelling is in the midst of a revival.
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner James DeBruicker for scoring a copy of Hound by Vincent McCaffrey.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales by Greer Gilman. In the eighteen years since her IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award–winning debut novel Moonwise, Greer Gilman’s writing has only grown more complex and entrancing. Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight. Cloud & Ashes comprises three tales: “Jack Daw’s Pack” (Nebula Award finalist), “A Crowd of Bone” (winner of the World Fantasy Award), and the new third part, a whole novel, “Unleaving.” Inventive, playful, and erudite, Gilman is an archeolexicologist rewriting language itself in these long-awaited tales. Read more »
Ever fall in love with someone and then find out that they’re kind of an ass? Yeah…me too. The first Rilke that ever crossed my hands was Letters to a Young Poet, and I still remember the effect it had on me. I felt as if I had found my soul mate….if he had been in the room (and alive) I would have jumped him on the spot. There is a vibrant grace and poignant longing in every bit of Rilke I have read, and the first elegy of his Duino Elegies has the power to hit some g-spot deep in my heart and bring me to tears. So finding out that he was actually kind of a whiney, narcissistic brat was analogous to finding out as a kid that Santa Claus didn’t really exist.
According to Robert Vilain, the Rilke I’m having an affair with in my head is NOT in fact the same Rilke who inhabited this planet. Real Rilke was “vain, self-pitying, obsessive, narcissistic, snobbish, whining, arrogant, childish, demanding, lachrymose and neurotic, as well as being given to tantrums and panics.” However, apparently my g-spot is not the only one he has been able to hit; even though he was a bit of an ass, Rilke was also “magnetically attractive to a series of women.”
So what does it mean when you fall in love with someone who isn’t a very nice person? And should you try to separate the artist from the art? And why doesn’t Rilke ever return my phone calls?! Read more »
"It takes a lot less time and most people won't notice the difference until it's too late"
Literary Lovers – I don’t expect you to know who Sandra Lee is because I would hope that most of you haven’t the half hour time slot to fit her into your lives. For the purposes of today’s article, however, let me take a moment to “enlighten” you. Sandra Lee is the host of The Food Network’s television show “Semi-Homemade.” She is also one of the many descending steps The Food Network took to get to the substandard hell it dwells in today. Before you call me out on my tendencies to overreact to things that don’t really affect my life and do not pertain to storytelling whatsoever, understand that my anger for her and that network is really anger at a bigger picture – she is the face of our society’s acceptance of mediocrity as the norm.
Sure, who the hell am I to say anything on the matter? I don’t even reread what I write here before I post it (please don’t fire me, Julia). I publish with the assumption that no one expects the respect of proper grammar and structure (although I confess I am so often tempted to correct grammatical and spelling errors on people’s Facebook statuses). We live in a society that doesn’t expect us to suit up for work and we buy electronics that we anticipate to break within the year. We are used to, accept, and fully expect things to be semi-acceptable and we’re totally okay with it. Things that used to require a written letter are done via Facebook comment. Announcements of important events are done via Twitter. Everything is casual. Things are good as long as they’re good for now. Formality is dead. Quality check is optional. Read more »
Oi vey, getting published. That’s the elephant in the room here in my graduate writing program. We’re all working on becoming better writers, critiquing one another, reading a ton — it’s incredibly valuable time spent on self-improvement. But let’s be honest, to what end? Why are we all doing this? Because we want to be published. We want the validation that our work is worth something. We want to be able to add some italicized names of magazines to our biographies. We want to write…drum roll please…a book.
Whether or not connections are actually necessary to get published is a separate question. But if you want to do something other than self-publish, you might have a tough time if you assume that the all-knowing, all-powerful internet can help you find a publisher. Read more »
This week: the J.D. Salinger tizzy resurfaces (um, in a funny way), Sarah Palin’s tips for writing a book, and a Twilight parody, all after the jump. Read more »
Some Thursdays ago I attended a TUCR event featuring Linh Dinh, a poet, short fiction writer, and photographer, who resides in Philadelphia. I was struck — as often a convincing writer can do — by Dinh’s seeming command of the language of his work, his assuredness as he clambered over the sometimes jarring terrain of his words, which words were in a language not his first. ”Command,” in fact, may be misleading. Say instead the speech embodied him, his entire form taking on the stature of his speaking. Say he was possessed, a shifting sculpture of the sound. Suffice it to say, a person could tell he spends time reading his own work aloud.
Before him, conversely, read a graduate student, who mumbled his poems as if simply trying to get them out of the way. I’m sure, of course, there were nerves involved. We were in a lecture hall, though as such it seemed small, and the seats were well filled with many new eyes, including my friend’s and mine. And yet, there was a certain discomfort, it seemed, with the words themselves — strangeness, as in the recognition of an old acquaintance with whom, at one time, one was dear friends — by which roundabout way I mean, he wasn’t quite embracing the work he wrote. Read more »
There is something distinctly magical about the idea of the “underdog.” Seemingly present in most–if not all–fiction, the underdog is only too easy to identify with. Who hasn’t felt that the world is against us, our problems are too great, our skills are too inadequate? What ultimately happens to this character becomes tantamount to our own abilities to succeed, or to fail. The need to read on, to learn how the underdog will summon his strength and overcome the seemingly insurmountable odds, consumes us.
As the saying goes, everyone loves an underdog.
But I wonder if this intense bond we tend to form with our beloved underdog stems not from simple empathy, but from some more primeval source. I recently was reading a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites, an interesting analysis of the origins of war and ritual sacrifice, which despite its subject matter provided some insight as to why we crave fiction and how, like ritual sacrifice, it might satisfy an unconscious, primitive hunger we all share. Read more »
The claims set forth in Robert McGuire’s recent post on The Millions present a way of thinking about the creative (and healing) process that really gets my goat. McGuire challenges the commonly held belief that the writing/creative process provides catharsis and healing and instead asserts that “writing is a process of degrading one’s emotional state.” He cites his experience of writing his first novel as an example of the dangers of emotional exploration in the name of art and clings to his shrink’s “fake it till you make it” cognitive theory mantra as a way to illustrate and prove his bold thesis statement. While I can appreciate McGuire’s boldness and honesty, I take umbrage with his thesis. And my thesis is more than ready to duke it out: Writing is a process of being present with one’s emotional state, and part of being a healthy professional is knowing: a) where to impose boundaries; and b) when to ask for help. Read more »
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Michelle Wittle who e-mailed in and picked up a copy of Crust by Lawrence Shainberg.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Hound by Vincent McCaffrey. A bookhound, Henry Sullivan buys and sells books he finds at estate auctions and library sales around Boston and often from the relatives of the recently deceased. He’s in his late thirties, single, and comfortably set in his ways. But when a woman from his past, Morgan Johnson, calls to ask him to look at her late husband’s books, he is drawn into the dark machinations of a family whose mixed loyalties and secret history will have fatal results. Hound is the first of a series of novels featuring Henry Sullivan, and the debut novel of a long-time Boston bookseller, Vincent McCaffrey. It is a paean to books, bookselling, and the transformative power of the printed word. Even as it evolves into a gripping murder mystery, it is also a reminder that there are still quiet corners of the world where the rhythms of life are calmer, where there’s still time for reading, time for getting out for a beer with friends, time to investigate the odd details of lives lived on the edges of the book world.
This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Small Beer Press. Gavin Grant and Kelly Link started Small Beer Press in 2000, after putting out a do-it-yourself zine, and working for years in independent bookstores, in order to publish the kind of books they loved handselling. Small Beer Press publishes literary fiction, innovative fantastic fiction, and classic authors whom you just may have missed the first time around. In their catalog, you’ll find first novels, collections both satisfying and surreal, critically acclaimed, award-winning writers, and exciting talents whose names you may never have heard, but whose work you’ll never be able to forget. Joan Aiken, John Crowley, Carol Emshwiller, Angelica Gorodischer, Naomi Mitchinson, and Sean Stewart are among the names on Small Beer Press’ growing list of innovators.
To enter the giveaway, leave a comment with your e-mail address in the space below, or send an email directly to contact@litdrift.com. We also recommend doing any or all of the following: Read more »
We here at Lit Drift are trying to take a look at how storytelling and literature are changing because of (and in spite of) popular culture.
Ever fall in love with someone and then find out that they’re kind of an ass? Yeah…me too. The first Rilke that ever crossed my hands was Letters to a Young Poet, and I still remember the effect it had on me. I felt as if I had found my soul mate….if he had been in the room (and alive) I would have jumped him on the spot. There is a vibrant grace and poignant longing in every bit of Rilke I have read, and the first elegy of his Duino Elegies has the power to hit some g-spot deep in my heart and bring me to tears. So finding out that he was actually kind of a whiney, narcissistic brat was analogous to finding out as a kid that Santa Claus didn’t really exist.
This week: the J.D. Salinger tizzy resurfaces (um, in a funny way), Sarah Palin’s tips for writing a book, and a Twilight parody, all after the jump. 
The claims set forth in Robert McGuire’s 
