Authors Electric

I started writing in high school. My metier then was parody of the sort that only a teenager could find funny. From parody, I went to poetry, from poetry to prose, from novel to short story to the personal essay. My road has been anything but straight. Of course, not all my writerly moves have been random. I started this blog because someone told me I should. Who knew that I would love it? To feed my blog, I collect scraps of paper. A museum brochure. A newspaper clipping. Some old photographs. Then I wait until that magic moment when the bones of an essay emerge. Memory In 2011, I quit my law practice to write. I had plenty of ideas and arrogance, too. It eventually became clear to me that I needed an education. I needed to read. What better place to start than The New Yorkers lying about my house? At the time, I didn’t know what to look for. All I wanted was to be surprised. By a pregnant image, a flash of insight, a chord of pure emotion. It didn’t matt...

Setting is a basic building block for any kind of writing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, prose or poetry or drama. There are lots of definitions of setting but I like the Wikipedia version the best: The setting is both the time and geographic location within a narrative or within a work of fiction . [It] helps initiate the main backdrop and mood for a story. Setting has been referred to as story world [1] or milieu to include a context (especially society ) beyond the immediate surroundings of the story. Elements of setting may include culture , historical period , geography , and hour . Along with the plot , character , theme , and style , setting is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction . [2] Water Lilies by Claude Monet. Image source: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Open Access initiative) But sometimes setting can be even more than that. It can rise to the level of a character, the star, the reason why this work was writte...

This book really doesn't need any help from me. It's already a classic. But I wanted to review it because I love it. I wanted to read it from the moment I first heard how it was inspired:-- during one of the regular revisions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, it was decided to exclude certain words, which modern children no longer looked up or needed-- words such as 'bluebell', 'heron,' and 'conker'-- in order to make room for words such as 'broadband' and 'wi'fi'. The book's wonderful artist, Jackie Morris, was incensed by this. She tells about how the book came about here. (The beautiful picture at the top of this blog is from Jackie's site.) Many other writers and artists were aghast when they heard about these words being dropped. There is a theory of language that says that when you lose the word for something, you also lose the ability to think about it or consider it important. It becomes something nameless-- ...

Eco-writing is the new buzz-word, an exciting genre for the times we live in when the word 'endangered' seems to turn up in every media article.  But what is it exactly? Field Work - photo Harriet Fraser  'Poet in the Meadow' If you go on the internet and search for a definition it will probably tell you that it's what used to be called ‘nature writing’, ( as in Gilbert White),  except that it has broadened out and now embraces a huge field of ecological, environmental and biological material.  But it isn't just scientific observation, it's a vast body of literature, non-fiction, fiction and poetry, that deals with human engagement with the landscape, flora and fauna of the natural world. It is often very personal, narrating one human being’s relationship with it. Eco-literature is a very popular genre at the moment, (there's even an academic field of Eco-criticism!). An Eco-literature magazine open to submissions The first literature I came ...