Writing is a religious experience for me, if not a religion in itself. I write to process the world around me, I write to find meaning, I write to remind myself that there is “something bigger.” And being a part of a community of like-minded people, whether it’s in writing group or in grad school or at literary readings, is important to me. I read for all of the same reasons.
There’s an interesting article over at Magnet Magazine on the relationship between art and faith, specifically in music, as discussed by a Jewish woman and a former evangelical Christian. Excerpt:
I don’t know how it is for different religious practices, but in the one I grew up in, namely Evangelical Christianity, a big component of it is to try to convince other people that your belief system is the right one. And if a person holds that to be true on the one hand, and then tries to make art on the other hand—in artist practice there’s a lot more exploration and you’re not working from conclusions and you’re trying to engage in a discovery process about yourself and the world. And I think that for me, those two ideas tended to be at odds with one another. But then I started thinking differently about the religious side of it, thinking, “Why does it have to be this way? If this thing is true, shouldn’t you be able to explore that as well, and then you’d always end up with truth?” And so I think that it ended up feeling better to try to do the artistic process—that that was more honest and less loaded with a bunch of ascribed meanings or what have you.
Come to think of it, writers proselytize as well, don’t they? Read more »
To me, nowhere is the juxtaposition of the high and low in art more apparent than in children’s illustration. Though one might look at a Jackson Pollock and think (but perhaps not say), “I can splatter paint on a canvas!,” one hears people browsing the picture book section and declaring, “I could draw this!”
But after over three years of reading the query box, I can assure you, ninety-eight percent of the people that scoff at the artwork, cannot just “splatter paint.” I’ve seen everything from four-fingered Santa Clauses, to illustrations of children without necks. And though we advise aspiring children’s writers not to illustrate their own stories unless they think their artwork can truly measure up to the illustrations that are already on the bookshelves, sometimes it’s clear that this advice is ignored at best, and followed at worst. 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 Ardith for snagging a copy of Osama Van Halen by Michael Muhammad Knight.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet.Lions, rabbits, monkeys, pheasants—all have shared the spotlight and tabloid headlines with famous men and women. Sharon Stone’s husband’s run-in with a Komodo dragon, Thomas Edison’s filming of an elephant’s electrocution and David Hasselhoff’s dogwalker all find a home in Love in Infant Monkeys. At the rare intersections of wilderness and celebrity, Lydia Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with pop icons and the culture of human self-worship. You can read Millet’s short story “The Lady and the Dragon” on the Soft Skull Press website.
Sometimes I feel like a broken record. I say it over and over again — the Internet is making people more literate, not less. (We’ve written about this before — see Jennifer’s great post about “the new literacy” here).
Then a column like this comes along and I feel like I have to debunk it or at least go on a rant for a bit:
Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé…The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing. It was inevitable that more than a decade of digital reading would change the way we do it…Meanwhile, a generation is tuned, increasingly and sometimes exclusively, to the cacophony of interactive chatter and noise, exciting and fast moving but plethoric and ephemeral. The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.
Writing is a religious experience for me, if not a religion in itself. I write to process the world around me, I write to find meaning, I write to remind myself that there is “something bigger.” And being a part of a community of like-minded people, whether it’s in writing group or in grad school or at literary readings, is important to me. I read for all of the same reasons.
This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by 
