Category: publishing

Judging by the number of writing courses offered, the answer for many is yes. But “a quick glance at the bestseller lists will tell you it’s hard enough to find something halfway decent to read at the best of times, so no great synaptic leap is required to intuit that most writing courses produce writers who are only going to be read by those unlucky enough to be friends, family or fellow course mates. So there is a lurking feeling that many creative writing courses are driven by market forces rather than any altruistic desire to release untapped genius.”

Can Salon magazine survive past the end of February? “The company has already been through several rounds of layoffs and cut everyone’s pay by 15 per cent. It now employs fewer than two dozen staffers.” But its remaining employees are loyal: “Our impending non-existence has been predicted in the press for so long and with such conviction that we considered adopting ‘die another day’ as a marketing slogan until the Bond franchise beat us to it.”

Forty German authors are hoping to set a new world record by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours. The team of writers will get their topic at 7.45 a.m. on April 23, World Book and Copyright Day. “They aim to have the finished book on shop shelves in 10 German cities by the evening of that day.”

Poet Linda Gregerson has taken home a $100,000 prize from the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her collection “Waterborne.” The award is the largest of its kind in the US. Gregerson is a profesor at the University of Michigan, and the former poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly.

A new magazine on culture out of Los Angeles has attracted some high profile writers – among them Douglas Rushkoff, Kristine McKenna, Spike Jonze – despite not being able to pay high-profile fees. The magazine is called Arthur, and it’s distributed free with a print run of 40,000 “Arthur’s success in gathering talent comes in part from a promise that writers will be lightly edited, and that underground artists and controversial subjects will be championed. ‘I know all this stuff sounds pompous. But there is no money here. This is an activist magazine. I have a clear idea of what’s wrong with this culture and this world. This is the stuff I’m interested in, this is the work that’s gratifying to me’.”

“Citing economic woes in the technology sector, Multi-Vision Publishing Inc. announced yesterday that Shift magazine, the Canadian journal of digital culture, would cease publication. Just over two years ago, MVP was the proverbial white knight that saved Shift when it acquired the magazine out of bankruptcy… The decade-old publication had ceased production once before and, on another occasion, was saved by employees who agreed to buy it.”

What’s up with writers with writer’s block? “You have to be able to afford to be blocked because, if you are a writer, not writing is a very expensive business – and it becomes more so by the hour. Therefore, it tends not to happen on Grub Street. I myself have written three novels and averaged 2,000 words of journalism a week for 15 years without ever experiencing the kind of bank balances where a block becomes a serious possibility.”

Poets have been much in the news of late. Poets are suddenly controversial (again). “Why poetry, why now? The answers might not be particularly mysterious. We are now into the second year of a period when words are being policed with particular vigor, hemmed in by off-the-record advisories as much as by Patriot Acts and Total Information Awareness. But such measures can’t help but suggest that words themselves matter, now more than ever. Poets have been saying that all along.”

Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s is a literary magazine with the kind of buzz most publishers can only dream of. “The magazine’s occasionally dense text and quaint line drawings make it look like a nineteenth-century literary journal – with a well-devel oped sense of the absurdly modern. Issue 4 came as a series of booklets in a box, the cover of each booklet designed by its author. Issue 6 was published with its own soundtrack, with songs to accompany each article. The spine of issue 3 contained a short story by David Foster Wallace. Then there is its openness to new writers…”

A group of American poets who were to have performed at the White House before the event was canceled, gathered Sunday in Vermont for an event called “A Poetry Reading in Honour of the Right of Protest as a Patriotic and Historical Tradition.” “About 600 people gathered at a church in Manchester, Vermont to protest a war with Iraq.