This is a favorite, much-kicked-around topic of mine, and earlier this week the good folks at The Rumpus added a fresh contribution to the debate. Messing With Memoir is an essay about the author’s efforts to revise her out-of-print memoir, years after she’d written it, and the ethical issues she grappled with in doing so. [...]
Archive for the ‘Tangents’ Category
The Rumpus Talks Truth in Memoir
Posted in Tangents, tagged Memoir, Nonfiction, The Rumpus, Writing on January 25, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Writer Richard Van Camp on ‘the Magic of the North’
Posted in Tangents, tagged Richard Van Camp, Writing on November 25, 2011 | 2 Comments »
NWT writer Richard Van Camp talks writing and the North in this article from the Camrose Canadian: I’m going to give you the only possible advice any writer can give you: if you want to be a writer, write something you would like to read. Growing up in Fort Smith, my grandparents were medicine people [...]
Graham Greene on the Victorian ‘Death Wish’
Posted in Tangents, tagged Cold War, Friday Night Nerditude, Graham Greene, Victorian England on July 15, 2011 | 2 Comments »
I’m going through some old notes and came across an interesting tidbit about Graham Greene and the Victorians. The context, briefly: A 1966 review in the Times Literary Supplement tackled a new biography of a Victorian general, and the reviewer questioned the biography author’s belief in the general’s “death wish.” Graham Greene wrote a Letter [...]
Freelance Writing and Editing Rates
Posted in Tangents, tagged Editing, Freelancing, Rates, Writing on May 6, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
In the course of some googling, I came across a few useful links regarding editorial and writing rates. First, from the Professional Writers Association of Canada: What to Pay a Writer. Next up, the Editorial Freelancers Association lists these Editorial Rates. And finally, the Editors’ Association of Canada has an explanation of the various types [...]
Two Takes on “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace
Posted in Tangents, tagged David Foster Wallace, Literary Criticism, The Pale King on April 5, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
David Foster Wallace’s “posthumous unfinished novel,” The Pale King, has arrived — let the commentating begin. Over at Slate, Tom Scocca tears down Michiko Kakutani’s review of the new book, and of the whole notion, more generally, that a deceased author should be evaluated based on work that he never completed. Scocca, in blistering form:
Wallace Stegner: ‘On the Teaching of Creative Writing’
Posted in Tangents, tagged Teaching Writing, Wallace Stegner, Writing, Writing Classes on March 20, 2011 | 2 Comments »
I picked up this little booklet on a whim at the public library last week. It’s the transcript of a Q&A with Stegner, Pulitzer-winning novelist and the founder of Stanford’s creative writing program, and in the same way that fiction writing advice often crosses genre boundaries and offers help to nonfiction writers, this book — [...]
Jonathan Raban’s Writing Retreat
Posted in Tangents, tagged Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau, Writing on March 4, 2011 | 2 Comments »
I’m slowly working my way through Raban’s Passage to Juneau, a travel narrative about a sailing voyage from Seattle through the Inside Passage to Alaska. Early in the book, he reveals the role that his boat played before the trip: Though I lived in a house overlooking the canal, and could see from the upstairs [...]
More on David Foster Wallace: Links
Posted in Tangents, tagged David Foster Wallace, Writing on February 1, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
It’s funny: I went years without hearing about DFW, and now, in the weeks since I finally started reading his work, I see his name everywhere. Wallace comes up in that Jon Krakauer interview I posted last week (apparently Krakauer tried and failed to read “Infinite Jest” at Everest Base Camp) and in this Financial [...]
Five Years Ago This Week…
Posted in Tangents, tagged Writing on January 31, 2011 | 2 Comments »
…my first ever travel story was published in The Ottawa Citizen. Time flies, huh?
