Writing Advice From a Master Storyteller

Our Competition deadline is rushing towards you: Friday, April 27 — every day that goes by eats up more and more of what time you have left.

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Rudy Valentino and his wife—and their cat, Gertrude (Gertrude Stein) Stein—on their way (via ocean liner from the Great Beyond) to the 2012 Elora Writers' Festival.
     They plan to get some advice from Festival author/reader Erin Bow—we can only speculate how... Twitter? A tea leaf reading? A medium?—on using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (Erin Bow used to work there) to conjure up a vortex of universe-bending "god particles" to bring them safely ashore on this side of things; so that none of this year's Festival will be missed... not one word of it.

Biting the Hand

From: Coverbrowser

"Late last week, the [United States] Justice Department warned Apple and five of the nation’s largest publishers that it was planning to sue them for price fixing. At issue is the agency model, a method of wholesaling e-books in which the publisher sets the retail price and the retailer takes a 30 percent cut. Most print and many e-books are sold under the traditional wholesale model, in which publishers sell books at a discounted price, and the retailer can resell them for whatever price it likes.
     The unnamed player in this drama is Amazon, which had been selling e-books at a loss until two years ago, when the iPad came along and publishers used the emergence of the new device to pressure the online megaretailer into adopting the agency model, too. If Amazon wanted to sell e-books from the Big Six (as the six largest book publishers are called), it could no longer sell those titles for $9.99.
     Publishers actually make less money with the agency model, so why have they insisted on it? The change was designed to limit the growing dominance of Amazon over American book retailing. On Monday, Scott Turow — the bestselling author of “Presumed Innocent” and other legal thrillers, and the president of the Authors Guild — posted a letter to members on the Guild’s web site. In it, he pronounced the Justice Department’s actions bad news for authors, 'grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture,' and (contrary to first impression) ominous for book consumers. I called him up to find out more."
— Laura Miller, Salon
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Ten Plagues — Caffeine-free

“'I know this is cheesy ...' [Jeffrey] Goldberg started, but before he could finish, the president interrupted him. 'What, you have a book?' Mr. Obama asked. Turns out, Mr. Goldberg did, but 'it’s not just any book,' he replied.
     Mr. Goldberg reached into his briefcase and handed the president an advance copy of the New American Haggadah, a new translation of the Passover liturgy that was edited by Jonathan Safran Foer and contains commentary by Mr. Goldberg and other contemporary writers.

     The idea was to draw readers into the story and invite them to linger, since 'the Haggadah must be the most skimmed book of all,' Mr. Foer said. After a pause, he added, 'maybe Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time beats it.'

     After thumbing through the sleek hardcover book, Mr. Obama looked up and asked wryly, 'Does this mean that we can’t use the Maxwell House Haggadah anymore?'
     Mr. Goldberg was impressed. 'Way to deploy the inside-Jewish joke,' he later said. Since the 1930s, Maxwell House has printed more than 50 millions copies of its pamphlet-style version of the Haggadah. It has been the go-to choice at the Obamas’ White House Seders, though Mr. Goldberg hoped the president would consider using their version this time around.
In the end, the White House decided to stick with the Maxwell House next month. But the book’s advance buzz is an unlikely triumph for a version of a ritualistic text that was spearheaded by two lauded experimental novelists from Brooklyn, Mr. Foer and Nathan Englander.
     'The Haggadah is the user’s manual for the most widely celebrated Jewish holiday, Passover,' Mr. Foer said on The Colbert Report last Tuesday. 'It’s one of the oldest continually told stories, and one of the most well-known across cultures.'
— Alex Williams, The New York Times
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Start... Now

"This tiny manuscript represents [Charlotte Bronté's] first burst of creativity

and provides a rare and intimate insight into one of history's great literary

minds." (from: ABC News)

"The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award is an opportunity for any young poet aged 11-17 to accelerate their writing career. Since it began 15 years ago the Award has kick-started the career of some of today’s most exciting new voices, including this year’s judge Helen Mort, a highly successful poet whose next collection is to be published by Chatto & Windus.
     With entries from over 7,200 young people last year across from the UK and worldwide, it is the largest competition of its kind and its importance is widely attested.
     Each year 100 winners (85 Commendations and 15 Overall Winners) are selected by a team of high profile judges, and receive their awards at an annual prize-giving event on National Poetry Day. Thanks to funding from the Foyle Foundation the competition remains completely free to enter and we are able to offer a wide range of prizes, opportunities and resources to young people and schools across the UK.
     Overall Winners from the 15 to 17 age category attend a week-long intensive residential Arvon course where they develop their creative writing skills alongside fellow poets. Winners aged 11-14 group benefit from poetry residencies at their school followed by distance mentoring. [...]
     The competition closes at midnight on the 31st July 2012."
— The Poetry Society
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Gravitas

Back in the eighties—for one night, at least—I was part of a trivia team formed to compete in a Toronto pub. It was just before Trivial Pursuits broke out big time. Modris was our heavy artillery; he was recruited for his nimble wit and his ability to dredge up both the recondite and mundane with equal alacrity. He was a "genuine intellectual" even then, but we told the barkeep he was a bus driver.
     This was way before the internet... we didn't need Google; we had Modris.
     Here he is talking about his house of books:
— Michael Hale

"When books are at the centre of your life, there can be no special place assigned for reading, just as there can be no special place for breathing. You read everywhere and wherever, all the time – and feel alive for it. I grew up in a house full of books; the dining room was in fact the library, other rooms mere annexes for storage.
     My house, too, is now full of books; we sometimes wonder how much longer our aging Edwardian construct will be able to bear the weight of Gutenberg’s legacy and Diderot’s folly. If disaster befalls us one day, it won’t be because of tornadoes churning north from Dorothy’s Kansas, or local gas leaks itching for a visiting spark; it will be because Wilfrid Laurier’s two-by-eights couldn’t in the end withstand the pressures of time and particularly tome."
— Modris Eksteins, The Globe and Mail
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A Farewell to Spines

From: Delaney Restorations

"I’ve been giving away my babies. No, not my actual children – that would contravene various recycling regulations and their grandparents would never forgive me. Instead, I’ve spent the past six months giving away hundreds of books that I’ve hauled, at the cost of many simoleons and slipped discs, around two continents.[...]
     There’s a low stone wall outside our house, and one day we left a stack on it. Nothing too heart-wrenching: one was a spare copy of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas; another was a book about Prairie populism. I was sure that would sit there forever, because we live in London, where most people couldn’t name the current Canadian Prime Minister, let alone Preston Manning. I sat watching from the window like a parent on the first day of kindergarten, ready to spring into action if anyone hurt my babies. People walked by, stopped, browsed, read the jacket copy. And here’s the crazy part: They took everything."
— Elizabeth Renzetti, The Globe and Mail
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