Other People’s Writing
Publication and news from UMass folks:
- “The Future Of Family Radio,” a new story by Christy Crutchfield, is up at Necessary Fiction
- Jensen Beach has two stories in the 2010 Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions, “Family” from Necessary Fiction and “We Cannot Cross the River” from Everyday Genius.
- Also in the Top 50 are several stories at journals edited by UMass writers:
- From Mike Young’s NOÖ Journal: Matt Bell’s “Brother, There Is a Field” and Karen Gentry’s “Treasure Island”
- From Brian Mihok and Edward Mullany’s Matchbook: Nicholas Brown’s “The New Toothbrush”
- From Hobart (Jensen Beach, co-web editor): Alan Rossi’s “Three Mississippi Fictions”.
- Hobart, Matchbook and Gabe Durham also had stories in the Long Shortlist. Congratulations, everybody!
Old favorites I’m re-reading:
- Kelly Link’s “Light,” from Tin House
- Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana” from The New Yorker (subscription required)
Inside Higher Ed’s “Confessions Of A Tenured Professor” is a must-read if you’re planning to teach at the university level in the U.S. (via Laura, who discusses the adjunct faculty situation further)
Armenian activism, powered by…. LiveJournal?
Somehow I am only now reading The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (or here, in The New Yorker original from October 14, 1961 (subscription required)). Acerbic, addictive, amazingly, delightfully scattered in time, it’s a tour de force in misdirection and I think Muriel Spark would be pleased to know how many creative writing do’s and don’ts she violates. Particularly show, don’t tell. The (terrific) film version (necessarily) irons out the narrator’s jumps backwards and forwards in time, so that while faithfully translating the book’s mood and events it completely removes the narrative intelligence that one senses when reading it, the immediate awareness not of a series of actions, scenes and decisions but of a story whose drama arises because it’s told in a certain way, and which has no anxiety about “grabbing the reader” or “holding the reader’s attention” (James Wood agrees - “Never Apologize, Never Explain”).
Muriel Spark didn’t start writing novels until she was thirty-six.
