The Ploughshares Round-Down: Is It True You Can’t Make Any Money Writing Books?
When I was making the switch last year from being an editor to being an agent, I heard from older agents that I was making a huge mistake. Advances are shrinking, they said. Midlist authors are going without contracts, and everybody is self-publishing. The whole industry is falling apart!
WORKSHOP OF FIRE!!!!
It’s your senior year of college. What kind of writer are you? Do you start writing a story eight hours before it’s due? Do you fictionalize your latest fight with your jerk-face manager or diva housemate? Does every one of your stories read like a screenplay? Like a poem?
Story as Architecture / Architecture as Story
“Think of revision as architecture rather than interior decorating,” my teacher Sonia Pilcer used to tell her Writers’ Block class at the West Side YMCA Writer’s Voice. Narrative as architecture is a useful analogy. Does your story stand on its own? Can its doors open and close? Is it solid
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Three Small Town Stories” by Dinah Cox
I’ve recently become friends with a new handful of people, and out of this group, one woman in particular. Then, over the last weekend, I got to see some old friends from grad school, and in talking about our lives and the new people we’ve met since we graduated,
Grant Boxing Your Favor: On Joyce Carol Oates’ On Boxing
Under Review: On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates (2006, Harper Perennial, 271 pages) It’s an awesome and unlikely image: Joyce Carol Oates, the gaunt and whispery living legend of fiction, eagerly and appreciatively watching Mike Tyson—yes, that Mike Tyson—spar and grunt his way through his daily training session in quiet Catskill,
Prepare Your Battlements: Six Ways to Survive Reviews
If you’re putting your writing out into the world, you’re going to get reviews. Maybe not in newspapers, or even from the woman on Goodreads who’s determined to start every single review with “I wanted so much to like this book,” but from your MFA workshop, your college professor,
The Ploughshares Round-Down: Creativity Is Neither Magic Nor Madness
At the end of 2009, I was hunched in the passenger seat of a van, weeping down a midwest interstate. We’d just recorded an album with a Grammy-winning producer, paying for it with months of fan-funding hype. And we were touring to promote it, planning to release it ASAP,
The Newest Big Thing From Latin America
Every once in awhile a book comes across my desk that I read and can’t believe hasn’t blown up bigger already. Jennifer Clement’s Prayers for the Stolen is the thing I’m big on right now, a novel about the dangers of being a girl in contemporary Narco Mexico, narrated
Episodia 2.3: Why Writers Need Jury Duty
A while back, when I was living near Newark, I got a summons for jury duty. As soon as I saw the thin slip of paper that labeled me as “juror x,” I started to brainstorm how I might be able to get out of it. I was more
Figures for an Apocalypse
This review was contributed by Nathan McNamara. Figures for an Apocalypse Edward Mullany Publishing Genius Press, August 2013 198 pages $14.95 Edward Mullany, author of Figures for an Apocalypse, describes himself as a writer who creates short things that sometimes have “story” in them and sometimes don’t. His prose