TOBI'S DESK

The Miles Morland Writing Scholarships, the most prestigious literary grant initiative in the continent, are open for submissions for 2019. Created by the Miles Morland Foundation (MMF), one is a fiction award of £18,000 to two, three or four writers over the course of twelve months, and the other a nonfiction award of £22,000-27,000 to […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/31XlNxw

Ben Lerner. © John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Used with permission. Ben Lerner’s forthcoming novel The Topeka School weaves a masterful narrative of the impact that mental illness, misogyny, homophobia, politics, and religion have on children who want to be men. The book follows high school debate champion Adam Gordon’s coming of age in the nineties, told through the voices of his psychoanalyst parents, interspersed with the story of his bullied childhood peer, Darren, to form an intricate exploration of Topeka and the way we recall our youth. There is a tension in the fallibility of each memory, which Lerner’s characters examine and reexamine through the lenses of adulthood, therapy, and language. As Adam discovers poetry, the book—and thus his life—takes the form of art, something edited and revised and set out for scrutiny. In the present day, Adam demands, “Tell me what led up to this scene,” and though The Topeka School is heavily steeped in mid-90’s American l...

Our own Sonya Chun g went on Jenn Baker ’s excellent podcast, Minorities in Publishing , where she discussed, among other things, her recent essay on Green Book and dealing with imposter syndrome as a writer.”After book two, I had more of secure sense that indeed I am a writer,” Chung says. “That’s what I do and what I’m hopefully going to keep doing. The degree of success one has with that is a totally different question.” The post Sonya Chung on the Writing Life appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2RGKj1b

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a flash point in the struggle for queer and trans rights. To commemorate the occasion, OR Books has reissued Fred W. McDarrah’s long-out-of-print Pride: Photographs after Stonewall , an essential collection of images by the Village Voice ’s first staff photographer and picture editor. In McDarrah’s work, we see the nascent stages of a movement that’s still making strides to this day. There is pain—an Act-Up demonstrator getting dragged away by cops in riot gear—but also triumph and joy: men kissing in Central Park, silhouettes slinking toward waterfront bars, the Gay Men’s Chorus singing, smiling, looking dashing in their matching tuxedos. A selection of McDarrah’s photos appears below. The first Stonewall anniversary march, held on June 28, 1970, was organized by the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee, led by Foster Gunnison and Craig Rodwell. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah, from Pride: Photographs after Ston...

Not long ago I was asked point-blank if a short story I’d written, wherein the narrator gets high on crack cocaine, was based on firsthand knowledge. This was not the first time someone had inquired if I’d had similar experiences as my fictional characters: soldier at war, manager of a Walmart, cook in a restaurant, et cetera. It’s a slightly invasive line of questioning, to be sure, but mostly it’s flattering, because, after all, the question implies that I’ve managed to create a world so convincing that the reader has been forced to wonder whether what they’re reading has actually crossed the threshold into the realm of nonfiction. I will sometimes answer honestly—no, I was never a soldier; no, I was never a manager; yes, I was a cook—but often I’ll deflect, especially when it’s one of my creative writing students asking about my possible drug use in front of the entire class. All that matters, I will say didactically and evasively, is whether the story seems real. Which is why I ...

Elizabeth Bishop published only 100 poems in her lifetime and yet is still considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 and a National Book Award in 1970. Her poems are characterized by careful, detailed observation and the refusal to give in to the confessional impulse of her contemporaries, Plath , Sexton and Lowell . At first, the poems can feel detached from experience, so cool and remote is the speaker’s voice, but this impersonality reveals strong emotion below the polished surface. These 11 poems depict Bishop as a traveler, both literally and metaphorically, as someone who moved restlessly between the domestic and the exotic, between the unknown and the familiar, elsewhere and “home.” 1. “The Map” A map is of course one of a traveler’s most necessary possessions. No surprise, then, that this is the first poem in Elizabeth Bishop’s...

What happens—to you, to your career—when the “woman” in “woman writer” no longer applies? For Catapult , Lio Min writes about a journalism career built, in part, on being an “Asian American woman” who writes about “Asian American women’s issues”—and then about no longer being one of those things. “For as long as I’ve been a writer, I’ve been a woman writer,” Min writes. “Here’s the catch: Over the course of the past few years, I have begun to feel like a stranger in my body. The more I wrote about girls and women, the more distanced I felt from the figure I saw in the mirror.” Photo by  Nayanika Mukherjee The post On (Not) Being a Woman Writer appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2NhCyA6

Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr. The first time Jack Kerouac’s name appeared in the press was August 17, 1944, when he and William Burroughs were arrested as material witnesses to murder. While the headlines were consumed that day with news of the Allies’ successful landing on the southern coast of France, the murder was sensational enough to make the front page of the New York Times : “Columbia Student Kills Friend and Sinks Body in Hudson River.” With noirish drama, the newspaper called the murder “a fantastic story of homicide”: a nineteen-year-old undergraduate had stabbed his older companion several times with his Boy Scout knife in the early morning hours in Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Working with frantic haste in the darkness, unaware of whether anyone had seen him,” the article related, “the college student gathered together as many small rocks and stones as he could quickly find and shoved them into [the victim’s] pockets and inside his clothing. Then he ...

In the spring of 1914, nine American sailors were arrested by the Mexican government for unauthorized entry into a loading area of the oilfields in Tampico, Tamaulipas. They were released with an apology, but without the twenty-one-gun salute also demanded by the United States naval commander. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the fleet to prepare for an occupation of the port of Veracruz. They were to await authorization from Congress, but then news of an arms shipment headed for the port overrode that formality. The weapons, procured by an American arms dealer, were destined for the newly self-appointed president of Mexico, Victoriano Huerta, who had been assisted in his coup d’état by the American ambassador; despite this, the United States sided with his rival. Battleships and cruisers landed a force that would ultimately number some 2,300. In the city they met with fierce resistance from determined but poorly equipped local citizens. The occupation lasted seven months. This pictur...

“I always got the exclamation mark at the end— / a mere grimace, a small curse.” Luljeta Lleshanaku , in her poem “Negative Space,” writes how she would wait her turn during a reading circle in first grade: “A long sentence tied us to one another / without connotation as if inside an idiom.” Other children would get nouns, verbs, and pronouns, but she was stuck with that vertical punctuation. Likewise, for many contemporary poets, the exclamation mark is a mere grimace; for others, a small curse. It was not always this way. The Italian writer Iacopo Alpoleio da Urbisaglia claimed to have invented the exclamation mark in the 1360s as a way to enunciate admiration rather than a question. In his book The English Grammar (1640), Ben Jonson again stresses the element of admiration, and quotes from Chaucer : “Alas! what harm doth appearance / When it is false in existence!” Eric Weiskott , in his consideration of how translators shift the punctuation of Beowulf , told the wider history...

‘Sleeping Girl,’ sculpted by Yiannoulis Halepas, 1878 [Photo: Nikos Vatopoulos] There are epitaphs, there are epigrams, and there are epigraphs. Creates a lot of confusion. (The other case like this, for me, is friable, frangible, and fungible. I’ve given up all hope on that one.) So try and concentrate. An epigram is, strictly speaking, a little poem that makes a point. It doesn’t necessarily dramatize; it doesn’t necessarily have an image. But it has to say something. This is an epigram: THEIR SEX LIFE One failure on Top of another Haikus are not epigrams. “Pigeons on the grass, alas” is not an epigram. It might be clearer to say an epigram doesn’t just make a point. An epigram scores a point. An epigraph is one of those little quotations you see at the beginning of a novel or, say, a T.S. Eliot poem. The epigraph to Anna Karenina is from the Bible: “Vengeance is mine; I shall repay.” The epigraph to Jude the Obscure is “The letter killeth.” Naturally, epigrams can b...