Authors Electric

This week marks the second anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. You remember: neo-Nazis, torches, one fatality and a US President claiming “You also had some very fine people on both sides.” Bullshit. But that's not what this post is about. It's about labels, how we use them and, perhaps, how they use us. This is what I wrote on my own blog Shanghai Noir in the days following this horror show. last week  I ran into an article by Lan Samantha Chang entitled Writers, Protect Your Inner Life . Sam’s day job is director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. When school’s out, she gives writing workshops in Paris (2014) and Napa (2016). At Napa, Sam gave a craft lecture on the interior life. She gave us a handout called “Ways to Nurture Your Inner Life”.  3 of the 14 tips involved getting off social media. I thought her article would cover the same territory but I had missed the subtitle . A Writing Life and a Writing Career Are Tw...

This week marks the start of my third term of teaching creative writing at the International Writers’ Collective , a creative writing community here in Amsterdam. It seemed like a good occasion to revisit a blog post I wrote in December 2017, wondering out loud in truly Hamlet-like fashion, whether I should be teaching at all. My existential doubts stemmed from a question Francine Prose asks straight up in Reading Like a Writer : Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? … The answer is no. What then was I expected to teach? Image source: Pixabay the first time When I was in college, I worked as a tutor. One semester, I taught math to local high school students. Another semester, I’d help premed students learn to write an essay.  The latter was a deeply painful experience because it turns out that, in order to write you need to be able to think. When all you’re trying to do is pass your freshman humanities class, then writing is...

Nicolás Espinosa [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)] Image source: Wikimedia In 2018, I received 17 rejections. I’m not talking about sexual advances or job applications. This is about me sending submissions to a literary journal. My submissions might be short stories, essays or book reviews. But because I am a literary nobody, my only way into a journal is through its slush pile. the slush pile Never heard the term? Lincoln Michels explains in The Ultimate Guide to Getting Published in a Literary Magazine . When you submit to a literary magazine, your work gets thrown (either literally if submitted through the mail or figuratively if submitted electronically) into the “slush pile.” […] The slush pile is a mess. Great stories absolutely come out of the slush pile, but they are hidden among the typo-ridden rants, third-rate Raymond Carver imitations, and haikus handwritten on hotel napkins. A good portion of the slush is filled with work...