June 13th, 2011

 
Grub Street News

Welcome to the latest installment of the Grub Street Rag, a newsletter of the Boston literary scene brought to you every Monday from the ugly aftermath of the pie eating contest at Grub Street's world headquarters. As always, if you are receiving this e-mail in horror, please advance to the bottom of the page to unsubscribe yourself.

Welcome, Director's Circle Members!

We launched our Director's Circle in April, and are excited to welcome the new members who joined in May. The Director's Circle is comprised of Grub Street's most loyal supporters and leaders, a group of individuals who care about the written word and want to make our city a destination for readers and writers. We are so thankful to have the support of such a fantastic group of people. Want to join them? Learn how on our website.

New Benefactors: Henriette and John Power, Lara JK Wilson, Wendy Polins, Deborah Porter and Nicholas Negroponte, and Eve Bridburg and Evan Rosen

Words Matter

Two recent news stories caught our attention, proving (as if we needed proof) that writing can be transformative and that good writing matters. The first, a CNN article called "When a Miscarriage Isn't a Fluke," featured a woman who had struggled with miscarriages for years. After her fourth miscarriage, she found comfort and practical advice in Grubbie Darci Klein's book To Full Term, and later gave birth to a healthy baby. Darci wrote to tell us how proud she was that her words made a difference in another woman's life, and how glad she was that Grub Street helped her get her book out in the world.

The second story was on NPR just this morning, "Skip the Legalese and Keep it Short, Justices Say." In it, the Supreme Court justices talk about how important writing is in their jobs, and reveal how much they admire great fiction writers. As Justice Roberts says, "The only good way to learn about writing is to read good writing," and from the list of the Justices' favorite authors (Proust, Nabokov, Stendhal, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, Dickens and Trollope), it seems like they're probably experts. Justice Scalia even admitted that he's a "snoot," which he defines as "a nitpicker for . . . using a word precisely the way it should be used, not dulling it by misuse." What he didn't say is that it was one of our favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, who is credited with coining the word "snoot."

See You All on Tuesday Night

Don't forget to come out to Harvard Book Store tomorrow night (Tuesday at 7pm) to join us as we celebrate the publication of Grub board member and friend Michelle Toth's first book, Annie Begins. After the reading, head over to Grafton Street Pub--one of the scenes in the novel actually takes place in the bar--for free apps, a cash bar, and conversation with friends old and new. If you buy a copy of Michelle's book at the bookstore, bring your receipt to Grafton and we'll hook you up with a free drink. Details below.

Our Daily Best

• Friday Five-O: Are real poets scary?
• Puttin' on a show! Writer as performer
• Agent and editor advice: the good, the bad and the ugly
• Friday Five-O: Seven Irrational Beliefs about Writing
  

Cheers,
Whitney, Sonya, Chris, Chip, and Eve

Grub Events

In addition to our ongoing workshops, Grub Street offers numerous writing-related events around town. See our website for a long-term view of all we do.

LUNCHTIME WRITING: Wednesday, June 15th, 12:30-1:15pm, Brown Bag Lunch Series
Do you work downtown and want to fit some writing into your day? Or do you have a schedule that gives you free afternoons instead of evenings? Bring your lunch and come on over to Grub Street for a Brown Bag Writing Workshop. For 45 minutes, you’ll meet fellow writers and get your creative juices flowing with some cool writing exercises. Led by one of our award-winning instructors or ambassadors. Best of all, you’ll leave lunch with some new ideas to ponder for the rest of your day, and beyond. No need to RSVP-- just come!
Instructor: Jennifer Elmore
Level: For Everyone
FREE, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, June 18th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Read, Publish: Polish and Place your Book Reviews
Itching to write but unsure where to start? Why not turn the last good book you've read into your first published piece of writing? Contrary to what you may have heard, book reviews are flourishing online and, yes, in print. In this day-long workshop John Cotter, Founding Editor of Open Letters Monthly, will talk participants through the good and bad -- the paying and the non-paying-but-prestigious -- in the world of book review publication, from the TLS to The Second Pass and The Quarterly Conversation. Part one of the class will be an overview of the reviewing world, part two will be an in-depth discussion about what editors to approach and how to approach them, and in part three each participant will polish one of their own reviews to publication-quality.
Instructor: John Cotter
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, June 18th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Our Lives in the Middle AgesThis is a workshop for writers of a certain (middle) age, according to their own definition. Based partly on James Atlas’ book My Life in the Middle Ages, and partly on the instructor’s own experience in facing ‘50’ and beyond, this session will explore how we can use the universal themes of aging—letting go, dealing with physical illness, the earning of hard-earned wisdom, and laughing at our own foibles—as the raw material for personal essays, memoir vignettes, radio commentaries, etc. In this day-long session, we will examine the work of writers such as Nora Ephron, David Sedaris and others, and then write on a series of prompts, which touch on themes of growing older and (hopefully) wiser. We will share ideas to strengthen and further develop these drafts. Finally, we’ll share ideas about getting our work ‘out there’ through publication in various media, including literary journals, newspapers, and on-line publications.
Instructor: Judah Leblang
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Sunday, June 19th, 10:00am-5:00pm, From Blog Post to Personal EssayThe personal blog is an incredibly popular and effective way for a writer to find his or her voice—but how do you move beyond blog posts to rich, complex, publishable personal essays? With the current cultural focus on personal writing, the essay, too, is “hot” right now—but where do ideas that go beyond navel-gazing come from? In the blog you write (or the blog you’ve imagined) you already have a record of the ideas you find most interesting. The next step is to develop them into fully realized literary explorations, and in this one-night seminar we’ll discuss how to do just that. Appropriate for the blogger and the aspiring essayist alike, the seminar will cover the narrative techniques established essayists like Didion, Lopate, and Dillard use to, in the words of Aldous Huxley, “look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description." We’ll discuss strategies for identifying those potential keyholes and how to use different structural models to produce writing with the simultaneous acuity and complexity that characterizes great personal essays. A reading packet will be distributed, containing both how-to craft articles and examples of the form both classic and modern.
Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
*SOLD OUT*, $115/$95 members, Click here to join waitlist.

SEMINAR: Tuesday, June 21st, 6:30-9:30pm, Publish Right, Publish Well
For writers who have completed or are about to complete a novel or short story collection and are confused about the next step. This seminar allows fiction writers to consult with a long-time publishing professional about approaching an agent, especially one suited to selling your particular work, choosing a publishing house, collaborating with an editor, and taking advantage of the marketing or publicity plan offered by your publisher. Discuss targeted strategies for promoting yourself and your work before and after publication and creative ways to grow your audience. Participants are required to submit a mock cover letter selling their project(s) to a potential agent or publisher, which we will workshop in class, and are strongly encouraged to send an informal marketing/publicity plan (that we will also workshop) outlining ideas for a website, store readings, speaking engagements, advertising opportunities, and other promotional initiatives, such as book club or conference appearances and review or magazine work, that will help launch their publication and career. Participants can also send a list of potential agents or publishers for review. Materials should be sent to chip@grubstreet.org no later than one week before class.
Instructor: Marisa Pagano
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

SEMINAR: Tuesday, June 21st, 6:30-9:30pm, What Is It? Finding the Form for Your Story
As writers, we know a great story when we see it. But it's not always easy to pick the right form: Is it is it an essay, a memoir, or the seed of a short story or novel? Should you consider roman a clef to protect your characters? Or craft an article to convince others of something important you've learned? In this class, we'll try on different forms for your story, and determine next steps for writing and pursuing publication.
Instructor: Trish Ryan
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

SEMINAR: Tuesday, June 21st, 6:30-9:30pm, Ask the Agent
In this Grub Street seminar, you will sit down with accomplished literary agent Lane Zachary, of the Zachary Schuster Harmsworth Agency, to ask any question that's on your mind about the role of the agent and get an insider’s view on life inside a literary agency. You’ll learn how to pitch agents and how not to pitch them, how agents make decisions, how the business works, what happens once you have an agent, how nonfiction projects get developed and more. Come with questions. The agent will tell all.
*SOLD OUT*, $65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Click here to join waitlist.

SEMINAR: Tuesday, June 21st, 6:30-9:30pm, Crafting Fiction from Personal Experience
The fiction writer and essayist Amy Hempel once said: "I don't feel I have a particularly large imagination, but I do have some powers of observation. Part of it stems from training as a reporter, when you're trained to see the salient points of any situation and see them fast. I can select one thing that will tell you the most about a character, but this is just from looking around, not from thinking it up." In this one night seminar, we’ll learn the methods of using personal experience and observation to craft compelling short-fiction and characters. We’ll start by drafting a personal essay and then use the material to create a third-person narrative.
Instructor: Christopher Boginski
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

SEMINAR: Tuesday, June 21st, 6:30-9:30pm, Anatomy of a Perfect Parenting Essay
How is it that some writing from parents can be so toe-curlingly bad, and the next piece can bring you to tears in the turn of a single phrase? What's the writerly magic that can make you forget the dishes and laundry and read a parenting essay through to the end? This evening will focus on five or six winners -- essays from Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth McCracken, and Ian Frazier, among others. We'll take a line-by-line deep dive to figure out exactly how these writers got it so right, and brainstorm topics and approaches that will allow us to scale similar heights with our own motherly and fatherly writing. If there's time, we can finish up with a short, practical discussion of where to pitch our parenting masterpieces. Participants will receive the essays to read ahead of time via email.
Instructor: Tracy Mayor
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

SEMINAR: Wednesday, June 22nd, 6:30-9:30pm, The Strange World of Writing for Phones
This seminar will explore the opportunities Mobile Devices provided — an entirely new medium. We'll examine how location-awareness and social media are changing the way content is both delivered and received, along with all the new publishing opportunities suddenly made available by the massive popularity of the Mobile Space.
Instructor: Steve Brykman
Level: For Everyone
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

SEMINAR: Wednesday, June 22nd, 6:30-9:30pm, Marketing Your Self-Published Book
For your book to sell, people have to know about it-- and telling them is what marketing is all about. But in this increasingly saturated communications environment, it’s harder than ever to know where to start and what to do. This session will look at smart marketing steps authors can take themselves, from defining their audience to messaging, targeting and timing. It’ll also look at why the most important step should take place well before a book is even written-- and what that step is. It’ll offer hands-on marketing tools, and case-studies of where and how they have worked.
Instructor: Sharon Bially
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

SEMINAR: Wednesday, June 22nd, 6:30-9:30pm, Writing True Crime
Crime can pay – with the right story. The nation is obsessed with true crime and publishers will capitalize on that with the right project. There could be a true crime in your neighborhood, city or town waiting to be explored, one that doesn’t necessarily involve gruesome bloodletting or macabre circumstances, but is still an unsolved mystery that could be unraveled with fresh eyes. In this informational and discussion-based seminar, Michele McPhee, best-selling author of six true crime novels, will lead you through a discussion of the following topics: first, how to define true crime; then, to what separates “good” true crime (i.e. Dennis Lehane, the master of the genre, and George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle, probably the best crime novel ever) from less successful true crime. She will also discuss how to navigate the process of getting documents and developing sources, the basics of reporting, and how to write a proposal that sells.
Instructor: Michele McPhee
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

SEMINAR: Wednesday, June 22nd, 6:30-9:30pm, Radical Disclosure (or Can I Really Write That About My Mother-in-Law?)
Every writer faces a basis decision at the keyboard: how much of my own life, and which parts, can I disclose. Will my friends and family recognize themselves. Will they disapprove. How do we, as writers, find the balance between their right to privacy and our right to make art? This discussion, which applies both to fiction and non-fiction, would use examples from folks such as Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Shalom Auslander as a point of departure.
Instructor: Steve Almond
*SOLD OUT*, $65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Click here to join waitlist.

SEMINAR: Wednesday, June 22nd, 6:30-9:30pm, Your Family, Your Characters
One of the most difficult tasks of the memoirist is learning to see family members as fully developed characters. As writers, we must set aside self-interest to understand our characters' motivations and allow them to live on the page. Only then will our characters have as much emotional reality for our readers as they do for us as writers. This is as true when our characters are our family members as it is for fictional characters-- only sometimes more difficult (as writers are human, too)! Fortunately, writing exercises can help. In this class, we'll use writing exercises to develop the characters that just happen to be our family members. We'll also read and discuss exceptional examples of family member characterization in published memoirs, and use these examples as models for our own writing. Come prepared with family stories and ready to write! Please note that while this class is intended primarily for the family memorist, it is also appropriate for the writer of autobiographical fiction, and all exercises will be adaptable for both.
Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
*3 SPOTS LEFT*, $65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

OPEN MIC AND PARTY: Thursday, June 23rd, 8:00-10:00pm, Spring Season Showcase
Join Grub students from the Spring 2011 term, plus two of our award-winning instructors, as they read (for 5 minutes each) from recent work. You'll hear great fiction, non-fiction, poetry and maybe even a screenplay. Open only to students who've taken courses, seminars or weekend workshops in Spring 2011. Everyone gets free snacks and drinks. Sign-ups begin around 8pm. A great event for current Grubbies and those who want to check us out. Bring friends!
FREE, Grub Street HQ.

Be sure to check out our website for a comprehensive view of upcoming events.

Spreading the Love

Grub Street wants to promote YOU! Please send events for consideration to whitney@grubstreet.org. Bonus points and undying gratitude for submitting your event info in the same format as the events below. Our apologies in advance if we cannot fit you in. Please note that we do the best we can to evaluate requests, and do privilege requests from members, but cannot be held responsible for the quality of these events and programs or the legitimacy of contests. We expect that readers will do their own due diligence before sending their work or their money to any individual or organization.

--READING AND BOOK PARTY: Tuesday, June 14th, 7:00pm, Michelle Toth
Harvard Book Store and Grub Street are very pleased to welcome Harvard Business School graduate and debut novelist Michelle Toth as she reads from Annie Begins. Annie Thompson is as brilliant in business as she is disastrous in relationships. It’s the dawn of the dot-com boom, and Annie is determined to make it big. But her love life takes a turn for the unexpected when her young, terminally ill cousin, April, makes it her mission to find Annie a husband. The fiancé April picks is definitely not the kind of man Annie would have chosen. Now, Annie has to ask herself what exactly she wants and values most deeply in a man—and in herself. Join co-sponsors Grub Street and Michelle at Grafton Street Pub after the reading (buy a book at the reading, get a free drink!)
FREE, Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave.

--READING: Wednesday, June 16th, 11am, Boston’s Gardens and Green Spaces

Join local author Meg Muckenhoupt as she travels through the verdant world of her new book, Boston’s Gardens & Green Spaces. This exciting lecture examines the role of public spaces throughout Boston’s historic and contemporary landscape. Rediscover Boston’s most revered historic parks and explore the city’s ever-expanding network of public spaces. How has the philosophy behind public spaces shifted over the years? How significant is the native flora and green space to the city’s overall health? This is a fascinating journey through green Boston, past to present—and all nature lovers, gardening enthusiasts, and history buffs should be sure to come along for the ride.
FREE, Trident Booksellers and Cafe, 338 Newbury Street, Boston

--BOOK LAUNCH PARTY:  Thursday, June 23rd, 6pm, Gary Braver
Northeastern Professor Gary Braver will discuss his new book (out June 21) Tunnel Vision. Free and open to the public. Stellina will provide free appetizers, cash bar, and ample parking. Bring a Friend!
FREE, Stellina Restaurant, Watertown Center.

--READING: Thursday, June 23rd, 7pm, Travel Around New England
Before you plan your summer vacation be sure to attend this Travel Around New England event. Four writers and travelers will share their tips and suggestions for vacationing in New England. Janet Mendelsohn, whose debut nonfiction book, Maine’s Museums: Art, Oddities & Artifacts will be published June 6, joins fellow travel writers Christine Tree, Alison Shaw and Christine Chitnis for a panel on unusual day trips, photography and thematic vacations in New England.
FREE, Porter Square Books, Cambridge.