Those old enough to remember the cartoon strip "Pogo" (my personal all-time favorite) know that the headline of this post is a paraphrase of one of Walt Kelly's most famous lines and it came to mind most recently when I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's piece "Your Writing Tools Aren't Mine" in the April 30, 2017, New York Times Sunday Book Review section.
Showing posts with label craft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label craft. Show all posts
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
"Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk" by Kathleen Rooney
In an earlier post, I wrote about Kathleen Rooney because she teaches a course entitled "The Writer as Urban Walker" at DePaul University in Chicago and my novella "Manhattan Morning" falls squarely into that genre.
To see how Ms Rooney handled the task, I just finished reading her novel "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk," which fulfilled my expectations in most ways, but fell a bit short in one respect.
To see how Ms Rooney handled the task, I just finished reading her novel "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk," which fulfilled my expectations in most ways, but fell a bit short in one respect.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Are Corporations, Society or Writers Killing Literature?
This post is about three writers offering differing views as to why literature appears to be dying.
"The Big Five publishing houses are located within a few subway stops of each other in Manhattan; that rich island which represents 0.000887 percent of our country’s surface. This is not benign. Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?"
So says Matthew Neill Null, a prize-winning author and native of West Virginia.
The lengthy quote comes from an article published by "Literary Hub" wherein Null complains that publishers aren't interested in stories based on the lives of real people, especially if they are situated in rural communities.
If they were alive today, writers such as William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe might as well forget it.
"The Big Five publishing houses are located within a few subway stops of each other in Manhattan; that rich island which represents 0.000887 percent of our country’s surface. This is not benign. Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?"
So says Matthew Neill Null, a prize-winning author and native of West Virginia.
The lengthy quote comes from an article published by "Literary Hub" wherein Null complains that publishers aren't interested in stories based on the lives of real people, especially if they are situated in rural communities.
If they were alive today, writers such as William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe might as well forget it.
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