In fact, the reader in me loves the second half of the magazine best because that’s where you find the book reviews.

These primarily [...]]]> Last time I was chatting about the cool things on the pages before the staple in Mslexia, but there’s a lot to love on the other side of the staple as well.

In fact, the reader in me loves the second half of the magazine best because that’s where you find the book reviews.

These primarily consider recent works, and most freshly available in the UK, which is understandable, but sometimes a bit frustrating (because sometimes they’re not yet available in Canada and it’s hard to be patient when there are new books to be lusted after).

A favourite feature in the review section, however, is the Literary Landmarks column, which considers “Groundbreaking works in the history of women’s literature”; this issue takes on Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, an apt choice. So if I have to wait for something newer to cross the pond, I can always turn to this column for suggestions instead.

And, not only is an older work discussed here, but there is a wee snippet titled “Missed Hits”, which haven’t been covered previously in the magazine’s pages but which are deserving (Nadine Gordimer’s 1974 novel, The Conservationist, in this case.

And there is the regular feature “One I Love”, which considers an older (sometimes classic, as with this issue’s consideration of Vilette) work that has fundamentally impacted the columnist as a writer (details on their Submissions page). There are always treasures to be found in this column.

Towards the back of the magazine is the Opportunities section. You would be right to assume that the majority of these opportunities are European, but you might also be surprised how many of them are available to overseas writers. It’s definitely a worthwhile source.

It’s all Good Stuff for Writers.

And, just as it bridges the summer months and September, I find myself maybe-perhaps-possibly-potentially thinking about ambling-meandering-sprawling-strolling back to more serious work habits.

And, so, I’ll feature it here, rather than the more light-hearted resources I’ve been considering [...]]]> In my mailbox today, the most recent issue of Mslexia, the July/August/September issue.

And, just as it bridges the summer months and September, I find myself maybe-perhaps-possibly-potentially thinking about ambling-meandering-sprawling-strolling back to more serious work habits.

And, so, I’ll feature it here, rather than the more light-hearted resources I’ve been considering in the stickiest weeks of summer, for this week and next (both sides of the staple).

And, speaking of features, Mslexia’s are a proverbial cut above. This issue’s feature is “In These Financial Times”, which considers ways to survive the credit crunch as a freelance journalist. I don’t always find the content personally pertinent but it’s consistently superior to that commonly offered in other periodicals that target the writing audience. For instance, I had read countless articles on e-rights before Mslexia’s feature on the topic and I found theirs the most comprehensive and informative, even though they were writing from a European perspective and I might have thought, initially, that its relevance for me as a Canadian writer would be negligible.

But what I most enjoy about the magazine isn’t necessarily the feature: it’s the whole she-bang. (That’s not a word that normally figures in my vocabulary, but it demanded to be used in this post.)

In the front half of the magazine, I always look forward to the News and Views. This issue states: 835. At first I wondered if I’d overlooked a new column, and then I read on to learn that sales of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Lacuna increased by 835% overnight on Amazon after its Orange Prize win was announced in June. Next to it is a short quote from Helen Dunmore (“I like writing about food. I find the way a character eats their breakfast very telling.”) with commentary explaining that she has won the 2010 National Poetry Competition and her new novel, The Betrayal, is now available.

One of my favourite columns is “100 Ways to Write a Book”. This issue features food and cookbook writer Claudia Roden, which isn’t of any use to me professionally, but I eat, and I cook, so I gobble up the list, which includes such general tidbits as: “Work all morning — all days long, really. But at a certain point, when you’re not thinking properly, there’s no point in sitting there. Sometimes you just need a break.”

I also love “Bottom Drawer”, which considers the novel that a published writer has not published, and “First Draft”, which compares a finished manuscript section to the author’s first draft of it. These are instructive, but, more than that, they’re reassuring. Many of the other articles — some directed at poets, others at songwriters, and many considering the more general subject of creativity — are simply instructive, designed to educate and inspire.

Arguably the most practical part of the magazine appears just before the staple (I’ll have more to say about the second half next time): the call for Submissions. (This is the section which deals specifically with calls for submissions for the magazine itself, not those for other markets.)

This issue’s published submissions pieces were selected by Christina Patterson, columnist at “The Independent” and former director of the Poetry Society. I’m not familiar with her work, but when I had a short story published there in 2002, it was Sara Maitland who was the guest editor, and I was tickled.

The New Writing pieces are consistently published around the staple, so this section of the magazine is readily removable, perfect for slipping into a purse or coat pocket for reading on the go. It’s this kind of attention-to-detail that sets the magazine apart to my writer’s mind.

Good Stuff for Writers.

Like Jill Krementz’s book of photographs, and Adair Lara’s sentences of evidence that you are indeed a [...]]]> Torbjörn Lundmark’s quirky QWERTY: A Note on the Type
Penguin, 2002

Following the trend of focussing on dip-in-and-out-able resources for these oh-so-sticky summer months, I’m looking to Torbjörn Lundmark’s quirky QWERTY: A Note on the Type today.

Like Jill Krementz’s book of photographs, and Adair Lara’s sentences of evidence that you are indeed a writer if such statements are true of you, this is not necessarily a practical resource, but it is informative in a “oh, that’s neat” kind of way.

Although some might argue that point.

Perhaps you travel in circles in which it is imminently useful to know that the letter ‘B’ stems “from a hieroglyph depicing a house. It was an architect’s floor-plan of a simple and unpretentious one-room place: an Egyptian bachelor flat, if you like.”

Maybe you attend parties at which other guests there would like to know that the most frequently used key on a keyboard is the space bar, or that the @ symbol first debuted on keyboards in the late 1800s but usage dwindled until 1971 when Ray Tomlinson conceived of using it to address emails to servers and addressees.

If you think you have an occasion to repeat rhymes like this, “Virgules, slashes, slants and strokes, Mean/lean the same to different folks”, or “If plus means ‘boom’, and minus ‘bust’, Then, sad to say, I’m quite non-plussed” then you should rush out for a copy of this immediately.

It’s Good Fun for Writers.

“If you are working on a collection of erotic e-mails addressed to members of the Republican congressional leadership team and composed in iambic pentameter (as I am), you might want to go with self-publication.” Steve Almond’s Self-Publishing 101

I’m betting that you’d like to Click Here:

the Guardian’s series on Writer’s Rooms.

Sure, they invited the odd composer and illustrator.

But, for the most part, it’s Good Stuff for Writers.

Although I do think the [...]]]> Jill Krementz’s The Writer’s Desk
Random House, 1996

Perhaps because it’s summertime, and my attention span shortened by humidity and holidays, I’m drawn to the books on my writing shelves that are not proper resources, but still distinctly writer-ish: The Writer’s Desk is lovely, completely browseable, enduring and endearing.

Although I do think the prose that accompanies Jill Krementz’s photographs offers useful bits, the purpose of the book is clearly to house her images. She’s snapped more than 1,500 writers and 55 of their photographs appear here with commentary (mostly snipped from “The Paris Review” interviews).

When I first leafed through these pages, I thought it was interesting how many of the authors therein were pictured with old-school tools. Many of the subjects sit with paper and pencil; sometimes you can tell they are working with a print-out, other times, as with Georges Simenon’s image, the sharpened pencils are outnumbered only by the pipes, so that you can’t help but recognize a tangible, long-hand world.

The typewriters clearly outnumber the computers. This fact stood out to me at the time because I was still at the stage where I desperately wanted to know if I was “doing it right”. Could I be a real writer if I sometimes wrote long-hand, sometimes pounded on my mother’s old Royale, and other times tapped away at a desktop and other times on a laptop? These photographs say “yes”.

My laptop at the time was an older-model IBM and seemed much larger and bulkier than the laptops that Krementz captured in these writers’ workspaces. But now leafing through this collection, I’m fascinated by how dated the technology in these photographs is.

Next to Ray Blount Jr.’s image is this: “Why write, when you can watch a movie on your typewriter?” It must have seemed astonishing at the time. Now, you can download avi’s while a piece of software writes your novel for you.

Mona Simpson’s laptop was likely cutting-edge, as was Amy Tan’s. I probably lusted after Cathleen Schine’s sweet little white number pre-dating the customizable skins now available and only Veronica Chambers’ looks snazzier. Now, you can revise your working draft on your mobile phone when you’re waiting to cross at a traffic light.

Flipping the pages, you can see Edwidge Danticat’s fax machine, its many buttons seeming to taunt Jean Piaget’s ancient radios. And Stephen King’s touchtone phone and scanner seem to shove all the rotary telephones into another century. But the images in The Writer’s Desk still feel timeless to me. I love this book as much as I did when I first got my own copy and I think my affection will hold fast through the next decade as well.

Good Fun for writers.

This is one of those delightful little books that shops keep near their counter: literary impulse buys.

My husband found it in Type Books, in their literary impulse buy department, and I’m lucky that he indulged me in it because it’s the sort [...]]]> Adair Lara’s You Know You’re a Writer When…

This is one of those delightful little books that shops keep near their counter: literary impulse buys.

My husband found it in Type Books, in their literary impulse buy department, and I’m lucky that he indulged me in it because it’s the sort of little book that I’d love to have, but I’d never have bought it for myself.

Not because it’s not delightful: it definitely is. But because there’s always a more useful/serious/note-worthy/prize-winner-ish/world-widening] book to choose instead.

Although there are some statements that aren’t a perfect fit for me, at least some of those are a perfect fit for friends of mine, so I’m willing to adopt the premise that those few which don’t fit either category must perfectly describe a writer friend of Adair Lara’s.

Here’s a sample:

You are shipwrecked on a deserted island but can’t send the rescue note off in the bottle because you have no access to spell-check.
You have an opinion on the serial comma.
You’d write anything they’d let you write: horoscopes, greeting cards, catalog copy. You’ve even wondered how much fortune cookie writers make.
You think of eavesdropping as researching.

See, it’s fun, isn’t it? Good Fun for writers.

Q. What is your daily writing routine? A. I write two pages. And then I read and read and read.

The collection, as [...]]]> Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
Shambhala, 2004

Re-visiting Le Guin’s Steering the Craft inspired me to re-read some of her essays in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination.

The collection, as the subtitle suggests, draws together a wide variety of essays; I enjoy them thoroughly whether they consider islands, high heels or libraries or whether they consider the rhythm of Tolkien’s prose, the disparity between the number of Nobel Prizes offered to male recipients and female recipients, or the calculated adoption of a pseudonym. Even if you think you wouldn’t enjoy an essay collection, but if you have enjoyed Le Guin’s fiction, this collection is well worth the time. But here I will focus on the essays therein which have been filed under Writing.

Because many of these essays have been published and/or presented elsewhere and because I’ve made the mistake myself of purchasing other collections of hers only to discover overlap in their contents, I’ll list the contents of this segment of the book; this list will help you determine, if you’re a Le Guin fan, just how quickly you need to find yourself a copy of this collection. It contains:

“A Matter of Trust”,
“The Writer and the Character”,
“Unquestioned Assumptions”,
“Prides: An Essay on Writing Workshops”,
“The Question I Get Asked Most Often”,
“Old Body Not Writing”, and  “The Writer on, and at, Her Work”.

Here are some snippets from “A Matter of Trust”, which is based on the following premise: “In order to write a story, you have to trust yourself, you have to trust the story, and you have to trust the reader.”

On the former, she advises that “the only way you can come to trust yourself as a writer is to write”.

But then she adds a thought to this, in a footnote: “And, of course, by reading stories. Reading — reading stories other writers wrote, reading voraciously but judgmentally, reading the best there is and learning from it how well, and how differently, stories can be told — this is so essential to being a writer that I tend to forget to mention it; so here it is in a footnote.”

[Honestly, if someone writing about writing doesn't hold this opinion, I find it hard to take their advice seriously. When a writer says s/he doesn't read? I immediately want to go and grab a book (and not one of theirs) and start reading.]

On trusting the story, Le Guin observes that a writer’s idea of a story is always more than what’s finally written, but “it may also do more than you knew you were doing, say more than you realised you were saying. That’s the best reason of all to trust it, to let it find itself.”

And, on trusting the reader, she discusses the relationship between reader and writer and she states: “Fiction is not only illusion, but collusion.”

In conclusion, she offers one of my favourite snippets from this collection:

“The whole thing, writing a story, is a high-wire act — there you are out in midair walking on a spiderweb line of words, and down in the darkness people are watching. What can you trust but your sense of balance?”

Good stuff for writers.

Beyond the reverent-but-not-too-reverent tone of Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, something else that sets this volume apart is the combination of specific advice and the suggestions offered for wider reflection on the [...]]]> Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew
Eighth Mountain Press, 1998

Beyond the reverent-but-not-too-reverent tone of Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, something else that sets this volume apart is the combination of specific advice and the suggestions offered for wider reflection on the issues she considers.

The segment which most impressed me and which urged me to procure a copy for myself, was the section on POV and Voice, and it cleared up some confusion for me at the time and serves as a succinct refresher even now.

Le Guin’s text is clean and tidy. The book is relatively short (under 200 pages) but the topics she considers are presented in a most useful manner; this section is one of the longer ones because she claims it is the issue that most frequently challenges her students and other young writers.

In the 22 pages that comprise this chapter, she describes five principal points of view, gives very short creative examples, provides longer literary examples, suggests specific exercises which involve writing short pieces (from 250 to a maximum of 1,000 words), and offers recommendations for longer readings in each POV. Certainly entire books could be devoted to consideration of even one of these points of view, but this chapter covers the bases and offers a terrific balance of content and encouragement to pursue additional resources.

And now I must say something about Le Guin’s reading recommendations. Because I read obsessively, such lists and suggestions are often my favourite part of books for writers, and those in Steering the Craft stand out. Yes, they include the classic writers whose work you’d expect to see referenced; if you read a lot in this area you become accustomed to the mentions of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Woolf, and Proust.

You’re not surprised by discussion of works by García Márquez, Twain, Hardy and Dickens. But what you don’t see as often are references to Margaret Atwood, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Esmeralda Santiago, Vonda McIntyre and J.R.R. Tolkien. Le Guin looks at the work of writers whose work is often overlooked and encourages her readers to look at it themselves. 

Good stuff for writers (and readers).