Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:
“But there is a profound difference between what a writer does alone in her room—the honing, crafting, shaping, transcending of her own personal history in order to carve out a story that is ultimately a public performance—and the human need to quietly share in the most intimate possible way, to confess, to stutter out thoughts and feelings, to be heard and understood.” Dani Shapiro muses on the difference between knowing an author and knowing her work. (New York Times)
“Cormac McCarthy is alive and well and still doesn’t care about Twitter.” So reads yesterday’s tweet from Penguin Random House, dispelling rumors started by a hoax Twitter account that McCarthy had died. (Los Angeles Times)
Sara Nelson, the current editorial director for Books and Kindle at Amazon, has taken a position at HarperCollins’s Harper Imprint as vice president, executive editor, and special adviser to publisher Jonathan Burnham. (Publishers Weekly)
“The anthology has not been picked up because it resists such simple reductions. The poems included are not obviously ‘about’ anorexia or bulimia, the body, or food. The poems collectively unravel the reductive myth of what an eating disorder is and how someone with an eating disorder exists in the world.” Poet Cynthia Cruz relates the challenges she has faced to find a publisher for an anthology of poetry written by women who have or are struggling with an eating disorder. (VIDA)
At the New Yorker, Andrea DenHoed writes about the late British writer Jenny Diski, her last book, and her resistance to the common narratives and metaphors about cancer.
“Even when we are in deep persona, there’s some private urgency that is working its way into the poem. Speaking through these masks might enable something even truer to the poet to come out.” Tracy K. Smith discusses poetry and writing her memoir, Ordinary Light. (Guernica)
“I’m convinced that Little House has prevented me from becoming an emotionally on-trend woman who ‘lives her personal truth.’” Emily Anderson examines the intersection of emotional stoicism and self-sufficiency in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved series about life on the frontier. (Atlantic)
