Like Pushing an Elephant Into a Volkswagen
There seems to be theme emerging around my current selection of interesting articles about writing: how and when to find the time. This article by Liz Entman Harper is a beauty. She interviews seven writers who write while also holding down a day job. The myth of the full-time writer is a perniciously sticky one—and…
Ursula K Le Guin
Ursula K Le Guin has been awarded the USA’s National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The recipient recieves US$10,000 and is a person who has enriched the literary heritage of the USA over a life of service, or a corpus of work. The citation includes the following: For more than forty…
The Trouble with Writing
The trouble with writing is that life seems to constantly get in the way. Michelle Huneven, a Californian novelist and journalist of whom I’ve never heard, put it much more articulately in her recent keynote address at the Writing Workshops LA: The Conference, which took place on June 28, 2014 at the Autry National Center in…
Drusilla Modjeska
Perhaps I’m just being fashionably late, but I’ve just read Drusilla Modjeska’s 2013 Seymour Biography Lecture and it’s brilliant. Modjeska ponders her “defection from that borderline ground between the biographical and the fictive, my journey through the check-points into the land of the novel.” Her lecture takes us to the highlands of Papua New Guinea…