I just taught creative writing for a summer session to a group of very bright and talented 11th and 12th graders. It was a very intensive program, a five-day-a-week gig for three weeks, in which the students studied and wrote poetry, short fiction, dramatic scenes, and long prose (both fiction and nonfiction).

It was very rewarding but also absolutely exhausting.

I got to teach the students a variety of forms, which reminded me that I need not pigeonhole myself only as a nonfiction writer (I started a short story yesterday!). I also got young writers excited by new genres and authors (they loved the idea of prose poetry!). That was totally gratifying.

I would love to teach creative writing at the high school or university level as a career in the future. However, this teaching position took up all my time even though I was only teaching for about an hour a day. My personal projects got pushed to the backburner. I was tired after leading class and trying to remain energetic all the time and then prepping for the next session each afternoon.

This got me thinking about the future again. Since I’m going to need a day job after I finish graduate school (no $200,000 book deals in my future), why not teach creative writing and do journalism to keep my mind involved in writing-related tasks and exercise my writing muscle? Read more »

At seven am every morning, I pop out of bed and drink a freshly squeezed orange juice and eat a zucchini frittata. Before I do any errands or school work, I spend three hours working on the latest chapter of my book. I eat lunch outside while reading volume two of Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.” In the afternoons, I revise what I wrote the week prior. I have a light dinner and then get back to reading Solzhenitsyn. Before bed, I write in my journal for an hour and keep the pen and notebook on my bedside table in case I have interesting dreams or book ideas in the middle of the night.

Or not.

I’m a graduate student. I have two jobs. I have a forty-five minute commute through New York City almost every morning. I’m usually rushing. I’m not really a morning person. Sometimes I get headaches from staring at my computer all day and I would rather cook a fun dinner when I get home than write anything. I do a lot of writing for school and for my jobs, but I’m not always good at prioritizing my own writing projects.

Scottish comedian and writer Al Kennedy had a piece up at The Guardian earlier this month about a day in the life of a writer:

…I usually compare my life to those of so many other novelists who are (perhaps inaccurately) quoted as saying they “always complete the final draft in my suite at the Carlyle” or “my writing room faces the smaller of our lakes and has a delightfully inspiring view across the Chilterns/Dartmoor/the Swiss Alps/Dollis Hill” or “I always get up at 4am, sip my organic mint tea – dew-kissed leaves fresh from the sunken garden – and then five or six thousand words tumble forth before Freddie and Timmy and the dogs wake up and I have to oversee Marta while she makes them breakfast – she’s from the Philippines and simply doesn’t understand toast” and so forth.

It’s mostly a spoof piece but she manages to be refreshingly realistic. We’re not all going to be able to wake up to the sunrise at our lakeside writers retreat.  We’re going to have gigs and side jobs. We’re going to be grumpy in the mornings.  We’re going to not want to write all the time, but we’ll force ourselves to because that’s our calling.

What would my own ideal daily schedule look like? Here’s a non-ironic fantasy: Read more »

Last night, I saw Edith Grossman, writer, translator, and critic, speak in conversation with Mary Ann Caws. The talk was fascinating–it was on the occasion of Grossman’s recent book “Why Translation Matters,” a collection of essays on the practice of literary translation. (Grossman has translated “Don Quixote,” many of Gabriel García Márquez’s works, and much more.)

The most interesting conversation of the evening came from a question posed by Kamy Wicoff, author and founder of the website SheWrites.

Wicoff talked about being stumped at how works have many lives–many iterations–in translation, while the original work in the original language doesn’t get revisited or updated for contemporary readers in that original language. Jane Austen will never be translated into contemporary English while there is probably a new Spanish edition every generation.

I think Wicoff has a great point. And one that I can’t quite wrap my head around.

I think it’s awful strange that non-English readers may have a better sense of Shakespeare than I do. They read translated versions that may be written in a contemporary version of their language, one that doesn’t sound foreign to them. I, on the other hand, read Shakespeare in Early Modern English, which means that as a high schooler, it was like reading a foreign language. Perhaps international readers can have a greater appreciation of Shakespeare than I can.

What does it mean that literary works (and plays, and poems, and memoirs for that matter) are resuscitated and revised and revisited only in translation while they only have one form, one life, in their original language? Should we be updating Old English texts into Modern English?

I just finished my first year of creative writing graduate school (cue exhausted applause), and now I’m facing the prospect of a semi-unstructured summer in which I need to: a.) earn money, b.) continue to write my thesis manuscript, c.) do research for my thesis, d.) sit in the sun a lot and have picnics, e.) recuperate from the stress of school.

To that end, I’ve secured a part-time job and have applied to a bazillion writers retreats, conferences, and residencies.

Here’s the problem, though. Read more »

I’ve had a weird few weeks.

I’m nearing the end of my first year of graduate school, where I’m getting my M.F.A in writing. Needless to say, I have lots of reading and writing to catch up on. My long-distance partner is gone for three weeks, which is the longest we’ve ever been apart (I know, we’re terribly spoiled). My refrigerator is broken so I haven’t been doing my beloved nightly routine of relaxing through cooking. (I know, I know, you’re wondering why all this has anything to do with literature. Patience.)

So what does this all mean? It means that for the last two weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time alone. I’ve been eating mediocre take-out. I’ve been ending my nights without my partner. I’ve been catching up on tons of reading and writing as I near the end of my semester.

And I’ve been wildly productive. My to do lists have been shrinking as I check off items that had been stagnant for weeks: do taxes, fill out the FAFSA, revise my workshop submission, pitch my story idea to a local magazine, read for my Russian poetry class, write a response to Wolff’s memoir for my family matters class, the list goes on.

All this and I should feel great. But, honestly, I don’t. Read more »

In honor of April Fools’ Day, I was going to write about (in)famous literary hoaxes: historic incidents of made-up memoirs when an author manages to trick the entire reading public.

There are already a number of Top Ten Lists of these kinds of hoaxes, including one from the Guardian and another from ABC News. They include a handful of Holocaust memoirs and James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces.”

But then I started to think more about it.  What is a hoax, anyways, when dealing with literature?  Why do people allow themselves to feel betrayed by an author?  I’m going to hesitantly posit an idea:  The whole concept of a literary hoax is a dying one because of the advent of postmodern literature.

Okay, bear with me here. Read more »

There’s a great post from Mark Gluth over at HTMLGIANT right now about cannibalizing your own writing (warning: before you go read the original post, beware that the image on the post is rather gross):

The pest control guy told me about rats that cannibalize dead rats. He’s seen cats that eat cats. Then I read about this cannibal star that’s eating a planet. It got me thinking about a ton of stuff, and as per usual I started to think about writing, about how I write, about how much the end results of my writing process are built upon cannibalization of the lesser results of previous processes. About thoughts that kill previous thoughts to give rise to new thoughts.

I think Gluth brings up an interesting element of the writing process that rings very true for me. My separate writing projects aren’t so separate after all: I mix-and-match parts of different ideas until I see what fits.

But I think using the word “cannibalize” wrongly demonizes the quite useful and common act of revising, recycling, and re-using.  Of taking the train of thought from a recently-killed project idea to jump-start the creative energy for a new writing project idea.

One of the most helpful pieces of advice I’ve gotten from a writing teacher is to create a text document prominently placed on my computer desktop called “Saves.” Every time I cut something out of a work — an idea, a phrase, a character, an entire written-out paragraph, something that is beautifully-crafted but no longer fits in my work — I cut and paste it into “Saves.”

The “Saves” document is now chock full of great snippets that I hope will find their way back into a completed writing project.  You have to revisit it everyone once in a while to see what you have.

Better yet, once you’ve collected these snippets for years, publish the whole document as is, a pastiche of pretty little things with no home (at least that’s what my professor, Leslie Sharpe, humorously suggested).

I’m about to start teaching creative writing and composition once a week to a group of 11th and 12th graders in Harlem.  Many of them will struggle with basic reading and writing comprehension, but my goal is to get them excited about telling their own stories, but also to respect the craft: to understand that editing is an important part of any artistic process, that attention to details helps the final product, and that constant practice (via writing and reading regularly) can only make their own creative and academic writing better.

So what kind of stuff do I want to encourage them to read in order to get excited about books and about writing their own stories?  My mind automatically goes to “the classics,” a list of books many of which I haven’t even read myself (cue the guilt).  But are these the best works to get them excited?

The bigger question is this: Is a classic work of literature (fiction and nonfiction included) always “good” writing?

Read more »

But baby, there’s no such thing as passing. We’re all just pretending. Race is a complete illusion, make-believe. It’s a costume. We all wear one. You switched yours at some point. That’s just the absurdity of the whole race game.

A quote from “Caucasia,” the novel from author Danzy Senna, about a girl born to a white mother and a black father, both active in the civil rights movement. Birdie, the main character, doesn’t quite pass as either black or white, complicating things when she ends up fleeing with her white mother after her parents’ separation. “Caucasia” is about race, activism, mistaken identity, trauma, coming-of-age, and family. This book had the biggest impact on me of any book I’ve read in the past two years. Read more »

So, judging a book by its cover is like cardinal sin numero uno, right?  We’re in an era when people often find books NOT because of their quality but because they have a pretty cover or they have a long enough title that it matches one of their google search terms. So I should be fighting against the valorization of pretty book covers, right?

Yipes, wrong, I guess.  My design nerdery means that I actually love to browse all the book covers in the bookstore.  I did some graphic design in college and led my own campaign against ugly flyers. That’s how seriously I take design.  This love of all things pretty, well-designed, well-composed, with nice typography means that I’m totally digging this list of the best book covers from 2009 from The Book Design Review blog.  My favorites from the list below the fold:

Read more »