Roundup: Summer is for Lovers (and Writers)

In our Roundups segment, we’re looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. We explore posts from our archives as well as other top literary magazines and websites, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week.

If Grease has taught us anything, it’s that summer is the time for lovin’, and if your inbox has taught you anything, it’s that wedding season is upon us. Here’s a roundup of posts about the often volatile, sometimes emotional, and ever dynamic relationships between writers, readers, and work.

From Ploughshares:

• “My credentials suggest that I have a committed relationship to fiction writing,” writes Rebecca Meacham in Relationship Rescue! Courting Your Long-Lost Writing.
• “A haunting follows and I’ll wonder—over and over—what went wrong. Should I have done something different?” mulls S. Hope Mills in ’It’s Not You, It’s Me’ & Other Reasons We Don’t Finish Good Books.
• “…you’re getting this letter because you put yourself out there. Read it, think about it, and put yourself out there again,” advises Eric Weinstein in What Rejection Means to Me.

From Around the Web:

• “I remembered that I loved the shape of a short story’s body, and how it moved: a sinewy grace that rushed headlong to an inevitable end…,” reminisces Steven Schwartz in How I Broke Up With (for good I thought) and Fell Back in Love With the Short Story.
• “Novels are unlike human beings in that we can’t know much about how they, as a species, are conceived,” poses Robin Black in The Literary Birds & Bees: How A Novel Was Conceived.
• “Those first pages help me decide if the book and I would make a great couple. Do I want to take it out for coffee or tea?” muses Thien-Kim in “When Do You Break Up With Your Book?”
• “Whether it is fatigue, disgust, or something in between, the breakup is because something is broken between the author and the reader,” directs Robin Bradford in It’s Not Me, It’s You: Breaking Up With An Author.

Remember, as Chekhov once wrote to a friend, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.”

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