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i am assuming that a lot of people who read this site do not write their own work for a living, meaning, their income is predominantly the result of another job.  what have other jobs taught you about writing?  i worked at a daycare and i learned that even a book someone may want to hear read to them day after day is still not as important as juicey juice and graham crackers and a table full of your friends.  i worked as a house painter and i learned that thinking long term is depressing and to focus on just doing small things right.  i have learned working with customers at other jobs that each individual’s problem is almost always him or herself, but his or her life manifests as a series of outward aggressions.  working at a pizza place i learned my boss was a dick and that some people hate you so much they don’t even need a two week notice.   these are pretty cliched lessons but i am posting this because i like to know what other writers (not necessarily famous) do or did for work.  also, since there are more writing programs at colleges, (maybe) it has become easier to do something related to writing for a living.  how does this type of job impact writing?  i can’t tell if this is a good or interesting article.  the school across the street from my apartment just had a three hour recess beginning early in the morning so i feel demented.

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The Millions is newly redesigned.

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Author Spotlight & Reviews & Web Hype

GIANT Review: Stephen Elliott’s The Adderall Diaries

1HTMLGIANT and the RUMPUS love each other; everyone knows that. We also work together often; everyone knows that too. It’s like this office romance everyone is really okay with and maybe even roots for because it’s between two basically likeable freelancers who are each a dozen freelancers, none of whom ever actually go to the office, and if they did it wouldn’t be the same one anyway. Which is another way of saying it is AWESOME. But given that fact, it seems ludicrous to pretend to anything like objectivity or critical distance about Rumpus-editor/steam-engine Stephen Elliott‘s new book, The Adderall Diaries. Therefore, I decided to drop all pretense and just write him a letter that says what I think of his book, which, by the way, is officially available today. (Click through to see his generous offer of free used galleys for would-be readers who make less than $25k/year.)


Dear Stephen,

READ MORE >

6 Comments
September 1st, 2009 / 11:27 am
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The Stranger’s Paul Constant on the Disney buyout of Marvel Comics.

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Editors with ‘Intentions’

sexual-predator

I’d like to hear some stories about people’s experiences with editors who use their position of personal contact as a way to flirt or otherwise sexually provoke the writers that submit to them. Seems like I can think of a bunch of male editors who I have seen show a tendency for this even in just their outward blogging stances, and I am interested to think about it more. I would say I’d include female editors in this but I have not seen that happen.

Anyhow, has anyone run into a situation like this? Where it seemed the editor was using his or her ‘power’ to try to elicit more out of the relationship than just literature? Any uncomfortable or strange interactions? How do these things begin, play out? Feel free to post anonymously, or use alternate names, if you feel like keeping it private. But I’m really interested.

Behind the Scenes / 199 Comments
August 31st, 2009 / 8:32 pm

Working Definitions?

Poetry can thus be defined as the art of language, as distinguished from fiction which is the art of written narrative, from drama, the art of theatrical narrative, or from the essay, the art of written rhetoric.

There are only two modes in which any genre can be written, prose and verse. Prose is unmetered language; verse is metered language. Any of the genres can be written in either of the modes; that is, there are prose narratives and verse narratives, prose dramas and verse dramas, prose essays and verse essays. Likewise, there are prose poems and verse poems.

There is, thus, only one logical answer to the question “What is the difference between poetry and prose?” Poetry is a genre, and prose is a mode.

–from pages 4-5 of The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics (1986) by Lewis Turco

Excerpts / 52 Comments
August 31st, 2009 / 8:12 pm

“Hope is the promise of a crucifixion.”

Fantasia1

So wrote Benjamin De Casseres–a lost legend of the early/mid-20th–a man about whom I knew nothing until today, when I read the latest Tabletmag.com piece by the great Joshua Cohen (whose “Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge)” will be out from The Cupboard Pamphlet later this year). Here’s a little taste of the article. Click-thru anywhere below for smorgasbord.

It is regrettable that for a man who wrote so much, so little is known, and so little is the desire to know. There is hardly any scholarship about De Casseres (he’s mentioned in a handful of doctoral dissertations regarding interwar New York literary society); none of his books are in print; and the manuscript of his thousand-page diary, Fantasia Impromptu, reposes in the basement of the New York Public Library, where I might have been the first person to read through its pages since they were interred there by De Casseres’ widow, Adele “Bio” Terrill, following her husband’s death in 1945.

[…]

But De Casseres’ posterity mainly rests on a single poem, Moth-Terror, first collected in the Second Book of Modern Verse in 1919, edited by journalist colleague and correspondent Jessie Rittenhouse. The poem was subsequently recycled into numerous reprints and subanthologies that proliferated in schools, colleges, and book clubs even after World War II (which should tell our writers of today that if they intend their work to live for tomorrow, they should make friends with anthologists)

Author Spotlight / 1 Comment
August 31st, 2009 / 3:59 pm

Hey, I got a rejection a couple of days ago!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWStaRmuXzY

I kind of like rejections, now. I have gotten so many they no longer really cut my heart out like they did at the beginning. But, you know.

How do you feel about rejection?

Behind the Scenes / 78 Comments
August 31st, 2009 / 2:38 pm

Random & Reviews

Not the spurs, Cormac!

big-fan-movie-poster-patton-oswaltWhat would you do if your favorite author (living) punched you right in your face, and then beat you into a coma for good measure? Sue? Have them put in prison, where they might not ever write again? Or pretend like it didn’t happen, in the hope that said violent wordsmith would continue to produce uninterrupted the works that you love so much?

This is the position in which Patton Oswalt’s character finds himself in his new, fantastic film of loserdom and obsession, Big Fan. Kudos also belong to Michael Rapaport, for his spot-on portrayal of a loudmouth Eagles diehard.

5 Comments
August 31st, 2009 / 1:13 pm

Diagram Summer All-Fiction Issue

94_tocIt’s one of the things I look forward to every year: Diagram’s badass and always mindbending gathering of finalists and winner of their annual $5 innovative fiction issue. The 2009 batch has just gone live, and this year marks another slew of things to stare at open in my web browser while I write my owns, including words by many new-to-me names: August Tarrier, Erica W. Adams, Michael Argest, Kristina Born, Micah Nathan, Lito Elio Porto, Nathania Rosenfeld, Rhodes Stevens, and Jenny Zhang.

Big highlight for me is a new long-ish text from heartthrob Kristina Born (yes, Shane Jones and I are releasing her debut book later this year, take a look!). Check out this sample graph from this fine show of freak:

The Gilmore Commission

Holograms can kill a man. Unlike linear images, which are easily sidestepped, literally. A threadlike sports car races by the locked glass doors. Since early childhood, Jack Twig, it has been your job to know the difference. (You said: the difference is it’s a psychological difference.) Mother and I have been losing our sight for quite some time. Even now, Teddy proposes a game of hangman and she declines, murmuring, patting her hands on her cheeks. Look at her. She is not afraid to die but of almost every other thing. Sometimes I wonder, Who can think without horror on death and the life beyond? and I know it is only my wife and only because her eyeballs are falling out. Sometimes I wonder, When comes the mutually assured destruction promised us by our greatest nations? Jack Twig, take a look for me: I think I still have some extremely deteriorated nerve agent buried in the yard.

I XOX her to death. Read the rest of this brilliant piece: Jack Twig is the Evil Pulse of Canada.

The rest is all as grand as well and a big gleam. Diagram continues to be, to me, one of, if not THE, best web journal around.

Uncategorized / 14 Comments
August 31st, 2009 / 12:57 pm