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Reading List: Wread About Writing

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Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

Salinger’s life is being made into a movie. Someone said writers work best with only one kid. Print journalism is, apparently, still the domain of white men. It’s been an unfortunate week. Here are four pieces to help you refocus on craft and life and journey.

1. “I Did Not Vanish: On Writing.” (Cynthia Cruz, The Rumpus, June 2013)

A tender dream of an essay on writing, risk and choosing life.

2. “Writing About Writers.” (Bob Thompson, The American Scholar, 2009)

In this delightful essay, book reviewer Bob Thompson discusses his interview secret—the “Didion Rule.”

3. “An Interview with Poet Rebecca Lindenberg.” (Elizabeth Clark Wessel, Bomblog, February 2013)

Lindenberg is the poet behind the crucial “Love: An Index,” written after the disappearance of her partner, the poet Craig Arnold. Here, she discusses her experimentation with form, her influences and how she sees her work changing. Parts of this interview are poetry themselves.

4. “To Write About the Button.” (Rachel Aviv, Poetry Foundation, March 2008)

“[Grace Paley] was just the opposite of a Romantic poet … It didn’t interest her to be a poet with a capital P. She was an absolutely ordinary person, and she was proud of it.”

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Photo: Joshua Burnett

Reading List: Wread About Writing

Longreads Pick

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. This week’s picks include stories from The Rumpus, The American Scholar, Bomblog, and the Poetry Foundation.

Share your favorite stories in the comments.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 23, 2013

The Secret Lives of Stories: Rewriting Our Personal Narratives

Longreads Pick

On storytelling, and the questions it answers in our own lives:

“Around the time our daughter turned four, she started making what seemed like odd requests. ‘Tell me about the sad parts of your life,’ she would say at the dinner table. Or, ‘Tell me about the scary parts of your life.’”

This phase went on for a while. I played along, telling her about my appendectomy in Africa, the time I almost fell off a cliff, the time I got a fishhook through my finger. We talked about deaths in the family, and she would sit with her eyes wide, not saying a word, listening as if her life depended on it.”

Source: Poets & Writers
Published: Dec 22, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,788 words)

A rant about Grizzly Bear and writing with an audience in mind

A rant about Grizzly Bear and writing with an audience in mind

Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing

Longreads Pick

The art of writing romance novels:

“The romance heroine, though possessed of heart, intelligence and beauty, is at the mercy of her own self-criticism most of the time. As the story begins, she is scared and isolated, poor, or abandoned, or lonely. Not infrequently, the book opens with her having just suffered some terrible loss; her husband has just died in a plane crash, or her parents or beloved guardians have died, and now she is forced to work as a paid companion to a rich and disagreeable widow, maybe, or she’s just come to Australia from England to live with her grandfather, who is mean as a snake. Then she runs into an unusual and interesting man who openly demonstrates his dislike for her, or else pretty much ignores her entirely.

“Difficulties will multiply. And almost always, as the tension builds, the heroine is beset with doubts about her own competence, attractiveness and worth.

“That’s just how I feel! the reader cries inwardly.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Feb 15, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,043 words)

Creative Writing

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A couple, and a writing workshop:

“Her third story started out funny. It was about a woman who gave birth to a cat. The hero of the story was the husband, who suspected that the cat wasn’t his. A fat ginger tomcat that slept on the lid of the dumpster right below the window of the couple’s bedroom gave the husband a condescending look every time he went downstairs to throw out the garbage. In the end, there was a violent clash between the husband and the cat. The husband threw a stone at the cat, which countered with bites and scratches. The injured husband, his wife, and the kitten she was breastfeeding went to the clinic for him to get a rabies shot. He was humiliated and in pain but tried not to cry while they were waiting. The kitten, sensing his suffering, uncurled itself from its mother’s embrace, went over to him, and licked his face tenderly, offering a consoling ‘Meow.’ ‘Did you hear that?’ the mother asked emotionally. ‘He said “Daddy.” ‘”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 2, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,687 words)

The Two-Fisted, One-Eyed Misadventures of Sportswriting’s Last Badass

Longreads Pick

Hunter Thompson lobbied Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone to hire George, who had been writing freelance music reviews. In a letter to George, Thompson wrote, “I want Wenner to have the experience of dealing with someone more demonstrably crazy than I am—so that he’ll understand that I am, in context, a very reasonable person.”

Wenner apparently felt one Hunter Thompson was all he needed, so George headed instead to the Boston Phoenix, that town’s version of the Village Voice. It was the ideal place for his freewheeling reviews of poetry, books, and music. His passion, however, was sports.

Author: Alex Belth
Source: Deadspin
Published: Dec 6, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,116 words)

Funworld: The Business of Writing About the Business of Roller Coasters

Longreads Pick

I answered an ad that asked, “Like amusement parks? Want to write about them?” and was called for an interview. Bill, editor-in-chief of Funworld, was enthusiastic about the magazine, the amusement industry, and, particularly, Funworld’s new computers—he called them machines—which were apparently very fast. When the interview was over, he told me the job was mine if I was interested. I was. At the time I knew almost nothing about amusement parks and attractions. Publications assistant was the sort of entry-level position that would give me a chance to learn. I’d file contracts and send copies of Funworld to anybody who requested them. I’d edit articles that no one else wanted to edit, like the twenty-six-page case study on the effects of G-forces on roller-coaster passengers (negligible), which had awaited revision for two years. And the article about shuttle coasters, which began with the sentence “Whooooooosh!”

Source: The Believer
Published: Nov 1, 2004
Length: 31 minutes (7,890 words)

Writing Advice from George Saunders

Longreads Pick

“You may remember some of my other biggies, such as, ‘Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey,’ and ‘Aunts and uncles are best construed as the heliological equivalent of small-scale weather systems,’ or (the mother of all advice-quote-pairs): ‘The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.'”

Source: BOMB Magazine
Published: Apr 27, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,096 words)

Story's End: Grief and Writing a Mother's Death

Story’s End: Grief and Writing a Mother’s Death