There’s a lot of hype around recent VIDA figures on where women writers stand compared with men for books published and reviewed, which, according to the VIDA, are fewer for women in both categories. But the figures appear in a vacuum, with data absent in a host of areas, like how many women are writing, per medium, and how many are submitting what they write.

Here’s a straw poll on where women stand in various other areas of publishing:

• Membership in writing organizations, particularly for networking: “We currently have 217 paid members; 94 are men, and 123 are women.” Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association board member and membership coordinator Dick Benton
• College library acquisitions by author gender: “Out cataloger can’t run a report by sex of author. But we can do a sample from our on-order box, and count how many male/female authors for the books we’re going to order. I picked two letters (M and W) of titles from our on-order file, because they were the biggest. I got 12 female authors and 19 male authors.” Tunxis Community College librarian Carolyn Boulay
• Women as writing clients and as success stories: “60% of my clients are women. I hear about their publishing successes, and it’s about equal,... more »

The list of AWP panels this year is overwhelming, several hundred offerings over a three-day period. It’s kinda ridiculous, when you think about it. Are we really expected to spend hours of our precious time reading through these descriptions?

Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s not annoying.

Thankfully, I’m here to help.

I’ve discovered that you can learn a great deal about a panel simply by reading the first word of each line of its description. And not only that, dear readers, but I have combed through all three days of festivities–all three!–and below have laid out the top pick(s) for each and every time slot.

(You’re right, it is very generous of me. But I’m a helper. It’s in my nature. I’m a people person, people.)

(I’m also broke, so I just want to mention that if you wish to thank me for taking care of this monumental task for you, you’ll find me at the hotel bar, nursing an ice water but really wanting a whiskey and ice water.)

(Jameson.)

Make sure to show up early for these, because once word of this post spreads, the panels below are going to be in hellishly high demand.

THURSDAY

9:00 – 10:15

R109. Zentner’s Saga

Zentner,

often

before

published

did

journey

emerging

10:30... more »

Five of Kevin McLellan’s poems appear in Fringe issue 25. Assistant poetry editor Nellie Bellows interviewed Kevin by email in January.

You’ve called these five poems published in Fringe your “little fragments.” Can you tell us about more about this project and how they came about?

Most of these little fragments were written between November 2008 and February 2009. This was a heightened time in my life, which is not to say that something dramatic was happening. It was more like mundanity, and that which was surprising that arose out of mundanity.

The fragments are not dissimilar to diary entries, because of the frequency with which they were written, and because of the frequency of the everyday, so when it came time to arrange them into a manuscript, seven fragments per section seemed appropriate. Since this number has the obvious scriptural associations, I thought the manuscript would benefit from being divided into seven sections. So the manuscript, titled Shoes on a wire, is a measured narrative sequence of these untitled little fragments.

Some of these narratives have a fixed number of characters for each line, thus physically resembling prose poems with a fixed-right justification. Some of the narratives incorporate white space within the confines of... more »

Some days, I can sit down in front of the laptop and stare at the blank screen until my retinas are aching. At other times, I will sit down and a whole article or story pours out. However, as an average, if I write 1,000 words of quality material in one sitting, I am happy. So if someone asked me to write a novel in six days, I would seriously consider their sanity. Seriously!

Yet that is exactly what one group of American authors is going to attempt.

From October 11-16, thirty-six Pacific Northwest authors are going to write a 60,000 word novel in a six-day writing marathon. And as if that isn’t going to be tough enough, they are going to do it live! Seattle7Writers and Richard Hugo House, as part of the Seattle Arts Crush festival, are organizing this groundbreaking event.

To keep followers up-to-date on the novel as it progresses, there will be large screens at Hugo House for the in-house audience. If you can‘t make it to Seattle for the event, the organizers have also set up live streaming and live chat online at www.thenovellive.org. And if the authors involved did not have enough to do, they will regularly... more »

I attended the wonderful Sewanee Writers’ Conference earlier this month, and in the packet for fiction writers I found a note offering the opportunity to meet with several book publishers, editors, and literary agents that would visit at different points during the 12-day conference.

As far as I know, there was not such a note for the poet participants, and very few poets attended the panels, Q & As, and the individual meetings held in tiny book-lined rooms so dim you could hardly discern the features of those hip New York visitors. It soon became apparent that many of us fiction writers didn’t belong at such presentations and meetings either.

In case we missed the large flashing-red billboard posted all over the mainstream publishing industry: SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS DO NOT SELL. At Sewanee, hopefuls, including myself, still attended some of the editor panels; we still met with agents. If we didn’t have a novel, these practical folk told us, “Talk to us when you do.” And if we said we weren’t interested in writing a novel, that we prefer the short form,  they looked at us blankly. Were we crazy? Why would we not want to write a novel? Why would we not... more »

Most beginning writers are led to believe they’re embarking on a great journey.

First stop: Learn your craft.

Second stop: Experiment.

Third stop: Workshop.

Fourth stop: Revise.

Final Destination: Your very own voice.

Luckily, there are many tools to help you along the way! Craft lectures, craft books, MFA programs, conferences– many of which push this belief that after much struggle and failure,  you’ll reach a place in your writing where you’ll feel comfortable. You will have found “Your Voice.” And once you’ve found something, there’s no need to search for it anymore.

Many of us like to read a variety of literature. Sometimes we feel like minimalism in the morning, and maximalism in the afternoon; satires at the playground, formalist experiments over coffee,  gothic fiction at the beach, fabulism in the bathtub, lyricism with midnight ice-cream. Variety is stimulating; it’s exciting. So why are so many of us, as writers, journeying toward stasis?

Because we paid our dues at the second stop. We experimented, and we failed, or we weren’t very good at anything, until we discovered the scrap beginnings of Our Voice. Workshopped and revised, Our Voice worked. Our Voice became recognizable. Our Voice got published. Now, we can wake up in the morning and sit down and Our Voice comes easily. Besides, there... more »

Author bios are changing. There have always been writers who instead of (or in addition to) including the standard list of publications choose to drop “interesting” factoids about themselves – their geographical whereabouts, the names and disposition of their pets. But it seems lately more bios are mini works of art themselves – works of fiction or memoir carefully crafted to hint at the author’s artistic interests, humor, and psyche.

These writers refuse the standard “He has been published in…” and “She received her MFA from…” They give something more rich and bloody. The story or poem doesn’t end with the story or poem. Here, in the contributor notes, is an offering. A free dessert.

These writers are my heroes. Because too many of us (myself included) have used contributor notes for evil purposes, mainly to judge the integrity of the author, to measure his/her success in the literary world, and to reinforce a hierarchy of “better” journals and “the best” MFA programs.

Interestingly, the artistic bios seem most prevalent in arty, online, alternative, post-avant garde, boundary-breaking, and/or new up-and-coming mags. The well-established journals, even the crazier ones, seem to sport mostly the safe and standard credential listings.

Perhaps this is a question of... more »

This week The New Yorker had an interesting blurb about marginalia–specifically the marginalia in the New York Public Library’s rare books collection by famous writers such as Jack Kerouac and William Coleridge. Marginalia, a fancy term for the notes and underlinings scrawled in books, can take many forms. The column got me thinking about how the way we read is such a subjective and personal experience–everyone processes what they read in different ways. I know people who consider it a form of vandalism to make any mark at all in the books they own, while others underline with abandon.

I don’t tend to mark up my books too much, but I like to be able to underline memorable passages, preferably in pencil, but I rarely make notes or comments. It just makes the experience of reading more personalized. Joe writes page numbers on the last page of the book with a couple of words from the passage he wants to remember. I find the process a little cryptic, but it doesn’t interrupt the flow of text as you’re reading. I find it’s like a delightful game when I borrow a book from him and then flip to the last page to go... more »

While some technological types are looking to the future to the keep the written word going strong, others have found that a bit of nostalgia doesn’t hurt.

WriteRoom is a computer program that gives its users no chance for distraction. Once opened, the entire screen goes black, save for a green sliver of flashing pixels.

WriteRoom is a word processor, and that’s all, folks.

Sure, technology has come a long way since the green-on-black color scheme of the Eighties, and there is a lot to be said for the endless avenues of communication opened up by the Internet, or the convenience of a cell phone that weighs less that a hefty Shi Tzu. The only problem is, that with so much potential for productivity and exploration, many people become overwhelmed and distracted, watching videos of cats being tickled rather than writing that Fringe entry.

Even this post is riddled with links to take you further and further away from that-thing-you-were-doing-before.

It’s not a exactly a bad thing, but if you’ve got actual work to do, WriteRoom may be your new best friend. Double-click away every diversion and, when you’re done, just click out and you’ll see that the black hole of efficiency you’ve been working within is little more... more »

It’s all very well and good to imagine launching thousands of messages-in-bottles across the Atlantic, to see them bobbing for years before nestling into the shores of distant and beautiful beaches, where they will cause a welling of emotion in all who discover them. It is quite another thing to collect all of those bottles and haul them to the beach in the family sedan.

With the Fiction Project, and similar others, the Art House Co-op makes beautiful ideas reality. More than that, they make them tangible.

The logic is simple: Most people long to express themselves, but they are nervous about taking that first step. Even when the step is taken and something beautiful has been crafted, self-consciousness can set in and that thing of beauty gets shoved into a junk drawer, or thrown out, or simply lost.

The good people at the Art House Co-op do away with all of those scary grey areas. Potential creative geniuses (that means you) need only sign up and wait for their notebooks and suggested themes to arrive in the post. That’s right. The post. If the prospect of receiving a package doesn’t make you shiver with antici…pation then I don’t know what will.

Participants in... more »

I love editing–maybe it’s because I enjoy pointing out others’ mistakes, maybe it’s because I have always loved reading, or maybe it’s just because most people cannot write and they desperately need help. The reason is not all that important.

I recently learned about a fun new way for the editor nerd in all of us to get our thrills (that doesn’t involve correcting loved ones’ grammar or whipping out our Sharpies to obliterate renegade apostrophes and quotation marks on signage). Bite-Size Edits is a new website that allows you to suggest changes to randomly generated pieces of text. Most of these sentences come from rookie writers trying to capitalize on social networking by getting free proofreading, but some have been uploaded by bona fide authors such as Tao Lin and Lydia Millet. It’s a fun way for authors to connect with their fans and potential readers, and to perhaps even get some valuable feedback on their work!

It’s also a fun way to procrastinate while you’re supposed to be doing actual editing…not that I would do that.

What do you think? Would you use this as a way to test your work out in the public?

*Cross-Posted to Looks& Books*

A recent article in the Guardian’s Book Blog (I’m addicted) debated whether it’s necessary to date a reader if you yourself are a reader. The writer, clearly also the reader in this scenario, says that reading is not only an intensely personal ritual, but also an incredibly social one. Think about the success of book clubs–most people find they can relate better to what they’ve read if they discuss it with others. This is something I have definitely found true, though my own book club is still in its fledgling days. I love talking about books and writers, getting recommendations and different perspectives from fellow readers. I am incredibly lucky in that I work in a field (publishing) chock full of voracious readers, and many of my friends are also readers (comes with the territory when you attend a graduate program in writing and publishing).

Okay, so if you love to read, you can chat about books around the water cooler, or around a few bottles of wine at a book club. Isn’t that outlet enough? Do we really need our romantic partners to love reading as well?

According to the Guardian, no. The writer says that his wife of eight years has read... more »

Fringe had the opportunity to chat (virtually, at least) with Laura van den Berg about her debut story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, published by Dzanc Books in October 2009.  The stories, a collection that blends the intricacies of human relationships with the magic of myth, have been generating a good amount of praise, and Laura was featured as part of the Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” program.

Here are a few of Laura’s answers to our burning questions:

This is your first collection. How was the publication process compared to your expectations? How did having your stories published in journals like One Story, American Short Fiction, and Boston Review prepare you for the experience?

Since it was my first book, I didn’t really know what to expect, but I’ve been really happy with the notice the collection has received. And I feel very lucky too—there are a lot of books out there, so finding an audience or recognition of any kind can be challenging.

In terms of story publications, publishing a book was a very different experience than publishing individual stories for me; the stakes, in a number of ways, felt much higher. But one thing... more »

The NY Tyrant Guide to Not Being a Horrible Writer in the Year 2010 is Vice’s uncharitably snarky take on slush pile cliches, and it proves that I, too have tortured readers of slush piles the world over. Here are a few of my favorites from the list:

“When you think you are about to write something really good, go to the grocery.” This is true of my own fiction writing. If I think a sentence is great, that’s generally because it’s full of purple-prose or writerly diction that calls attention to itself and takes the reader out of the story. A  good rule of thumb is to cut it in the second draft.

“Oh sweet, you went to that museum alone one day and had a tuna sandwich in the cafe? You’re killing me, please.” I’ve written this story. Twice. And it even got submitted out. <dies of shame>.

“Write less dialogue, unless you are really good at it, which I guarantee you aren’t.” Yeah, I suck at dialogue. Now I mostly try not to write it. Reported dialogue and narrative summary are my friends.

“Please, God, no characters who are musicians. There is nothing worse than trying to describe music, or how someone... more »

Hello. My name is Joe Robb and I live on the south bank of Cincinnati.

I don’t know what you know about Cincinnati.

When I used to live in Boston, I met people from the East Coast or the West Coast who thought my hometown–the mighty metropolis on the coast of the Ohio–coasted through a flat sea of corn, and that it was a town, small and rural, full of twang. They were surprised by my accent, and to learn that my city was big, and ugly sometimes, but beautiful at other times, so seeped in odd history that when you step on the pavement of Cincinnati, stories leak up through the cracks in the asphalt and the smells of malted barley and pigflesh flood your nose.

Was that too much?

Cincinnati is the Queen City, The ‘Nati, The City of Seven Hills, The Beer Capitol of the World, and Porkopolis. Cincinnati is the birthplace of Roy Rogers, Bootsy Collins, Doris Day, Stephen Spielberg, Sarah Jessica Parker, and King Records, but not Jerry Springer, although he served on our city council from 1971 until 1974 when he resigned, admitting he had hired a prostitute with a personal check . . . that bounced. The... more »

This year, as the final days of December tick down, our attention is not only turned to the end of 2009, but the end of a decade–the first of the new millennium. Shocking, isn’t it? Though it doesn’t seem all that long ago that the world was in a tizzy over Y2K, we’ve come a long way. The publishing industry has evolved and changed in ways that are barely quantifiable, and only continues to change every day. We’ll be feeling the effects of the Kindle, online media, flash fiction, and Twitter on literature for years to come. We lost some literary icons (Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, John Updike, Eudora Welty, just to name a few) and created some new ones (Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon). We’ve seen the rise of wizards and vampires and the decline of newspapers. Yes, it’s been quite the decade.

I love lists. I love reading them, I love making them, and I love crossing things off of them. But when it comes to compiling a “Best of the Decade” list, I find I’m a little too daunted by all that’s out there. When the Globe and Mail asked several prominent writers to... more »

Fringe Magazine seeks submissions for its fourth anniversary theme issue, “Working.”

To paraphrase a children’s classic, everybody works. Work crosses barriers between race, class, and gender, and sometimes (but not always) describes a person’s place in the broader social order. Now, with the economy just beginning to recover from its catastrophic collapse, working has assumed a great-than-usual prominence in national and international conversation, and not just because it helps people survive fiscally. People often define themselves through their jobs and, through useful labor, find value in themselves.

We’re looking for writing about how and why working—or not working—defines who we are, whether working brings dignity or humility to its doers, how it stratifies and sometimes defies our ideas about social class and who is or is not worthy of attention. We’re particularly (although not exclusively) interested in writing from a blue-collar perspective.

Submissions close January 1, 2010. Please send us your best work—see our guidelines on how to do so— and add “Working” to your subject line.

Fringe Magazine was founded in 2005 by an all-women group of editors dedicated to political and experimental literature. The quarterly online journal has published work by 120 writers and artists since its first issue in February 2006. Each... more »

Here’s my response to last week’s Meta Exercise. Since Julio Cortázar used a narrative piece of art, a novel, to construct his excellent short short. I thought I’d give myself a challenge and try to do the same thing with a less experiential sort of art, in this case, sculpture. Points to anyone who can identify the sculptor.

Daphne

Inside the museum, she allowed herself to be politely interested in the art, the pale statues he loved so much, David twisting back his arm, a grim set to his mouth, Poseidon’s hand against Persephone’s thigh, hands sunk into the cool marble as if it were a marshmallow. He had arranged for this private trip to the museum; he had paid for their first class plane tickets to Rome, but that was to be expected.

At first, she’d found his attentions in the bar where she worked flattering but overwhelming. His lavish words and gifts masked a paucity of spirit, a blindness, an inability to admire things for anything more than the surface.

At his request, their guide left them in a small room at one corner of the museum. He had wanted to look at a particular sculpture, by themselves, in the quiet. Her... more »

All right, I’m no Margaret Atwood, but here’s my (somewhat belated) stab at last week’s Cubist Exercise. It’s a start.

Soap

Imagine a bar of soap lying by the side of your sink. It’s a flat, creamy beige block no bigger than a deck of cards, with edges that aren’t quite plumb, smoothed by hand and water. You made it from skin-scarring lye and olive oil in the pot you use to make soup, carefully weighing the ingredients on a postal scale, and whirring them together with a hand blender, watching carefully for the signs of miraculous alchemy, the puddingy texture, the marks on the surface that stay turgid for a moment before vanishing. You poured the soap into a shoebox mold, and cured it in the open air for a month, to remove its green bite.

This soap is anti-corporate. All its glycerine is intact, compared to the stuff so easy to buy at the store. In a stroke of marketing genius, companies sell you soap that robs skin of its moisture, then offer the the glycerin back to your dry hands in various lotions and creams.

Imagine the industrial soap used to clean up after suicides, the blood from a gunshot wound... more »

Now that Fringe has put a call letter out for Features, the pitch letters have been rolling in. It seems not everyone knows how to write a letter pitching a feature story or interview, so I thought I’d provide some handy tips that cover what Fringe looks for.

Do:

• Tell us what type of story you’re pitching. Is it a review? An interview? A feature?
• Spend a paragraph describing your topic, that includes a reason why you think it would be of interest to Fringe readers. This is the place to show that you’ve been to more of our site than just our guidelines page. Are you interviewing a first-time author published by a small press? Writing a feature on avant-garde poetry? Reviewing a small-press book that explores the intersections between literature and politics?
• Explain who you are and explain any relevant credentials you have. Are you a published freelancer? A first-time writer?
• Send the piece as an attachment if you’ve already written it. If you haven’t, send online clips of your writing, if you have ‘em.
• Write two to five paragraphs, but no more than a single typewritten page.

Don’t:

• Address the letter to a “sir.” The vast majority of us here at Fringe aren’t sirs, so... more »