Dave Eggers Thanks His Teacher, Ken Kesey's Magic Bus Trip, and More

by
Evan Smith Rakoff
8.2.11

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:

In an essay originally posted on TeacherLove.org, the online forum for sharing stories about teachers who have made a difference, McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers talks about Jay Criche, the high school teacher who, with just six words, turned Eggers into a writer. (Salon)

Magic Trip, a film by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood in theaters this Friday, stitches together an unfinished documentary of the 1964 cross-country bus trip made by Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters—which included Neal Cassady, who was Jack Kerouac's model for the magnetic character Dean Moriarty in his 1957 book, On the Road, and was chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s seminal work of literary journalism The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (New York Times)

A Books-A-Million store will replace the Borders in Erie, Pennsylvania. (Market Watch)

Novelist Monica Ali discusses the consciousness-raising influence of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn on today’s installment of You Must Read This, a special radio series that “presents conversations with writers about the books they love to read and recommend.” (National Public Radio)

Drawing from his new book, Now All Roads Lead to France, Matthew Hollis writes of the relationship between American poet Robert Frost and his British counterpart Edward Thomas and how, as the two young and unknown poets became closer, they influenced each other’s success. (Guardian)

The editors of the Georgia-based literary journal Arts & Letters, are accepting submissions for their multimedia electronic journal, Arts & Letters PRIME, a supplement to the print edition that is scheduled to launch in March.