October 11th, 2011
"Fiction is a bit like my calling you up at midnight and saying, ‘Come over to my house, I'm going to have a weird party.’ And you say, ‘I'm in my pajamas.’ And I say, ‘You have to come. It's going be weird!’ Nonfiction is I go to your house at a reasonable hour and tell you stuff about your life that's interesting and illuminating to you."
—Touré, on why he feels he’s better at writing nonfiction than fiction
Welcome to the latest installment of the Grub Street Rag, a newsletter of the Boston literary scene brought to you every Monday by the devastatingly handsome stranger you can't wait to get to know at Grub Street's world headquarters. As always, if you are receiving this email in horror, please advance to the bottom of the page to unsubscribe yourself.
There are only a few days left to buy tickets for our wonderful fall gala! An Evening With Grub Street is coming up on October 25th at 7pm, and features readings by Gregory Maguire, Anita Shreve and Tayari Jones. All proceeds benefit Grub Street's programming and outreach. Tickets are complimentary for members of the Directors' Circle, and can also be purchased online. Hope to see you there!
Join editor Alan Rinzler for an inspiring daytime seminar on writing better and getting published, including specific practical steps to navigate the turbulent, topsy-turvy changes in the book business today. Alan, a favorite speaker at this year's Muse and the Marketplace conference, has edited and published major works by Toni Morrison, Tom Robbins, Hunter S. Thompson, Jerzy Kosinski, Robert Ludlum, Shirley MacLaine, Irvin Yalom, Andy Warhol, Clive Cussler, Bob Dylan, Dee Brown, and others. This seminar is the first in our new Publish it Forward series, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. http://bit.ly/qxJ3Nm.
We are so pleased to be able to welcome ten new members to our growing Director's Circle. 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.
Patrons: Timothy Oliveri, Christy & Jay Cashman
Luminaries: Andrew & Patricia Goldstein
Benefactors: Nichole Bernier & Thomas Ahern, Brunonia Barry, Katrin Schumann, Robert Wilstein
Cheers,
Whitney, Sonya, Eve, Chris, Rowan and Sean
The P.S. Don't forget to stop by the Grub Street booth at the Boston Book Festival this Saturday! We will also be leading a bunch of great workshops throughout the day.
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.
FREE LUNCHTIME WRITING: Wednesday, October 12th, 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 – a series recently profiled in the Boston Globe. 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!
SEMINAR: Friday, October 14th, 11:00am-2:00pm, Why This is the Best Time Ever to be a Writer Seeking Publication
A day of inspiring good news about writing better and getting published, including specific practical steps to navigate the turbulent, topsy turvy changes in the book business today. Among the questions we'll answer are: How has the balance of power shifted from the publisher to the author? Do you really still need a literary agent and if so, how do you get one? How do traditional publishers decide behind closed doors what to publish? What are the advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing and which is better for you? Why do all types of traditional and self-publishing depend on author self-marketing and how do you do it? What is the new author platform, and how do you build one if you’re not a celebrity or best-selling author already? How has the internet changed writing and book publishing today? What is the reality versus the myths about the publishing business? Included will be focused presentation with facts and figures, time for Q&A, opportunity for participants to discuss specific works-in-progress for feedback, and other forms of information and advice.
Part of Grub Street’s 2011-2012 Lecture Series, sponsored by the NEA.
Instructor: Alan Rinzler
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, October 15th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Jumpstart Your Writing: Fiction Focus
This one-day weekend version of one of our most popular courses has a very clear mission: spend the day writing.
Instructor: Chip Cheek
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, October 15th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Snapshots: Short Personal Essays for Print and Broadcast
A one-day workshop focusing on creating powerful pieces under 800 words for print, and under 600 for radio. In the class, we'll look at examples of pieces from journals like 400 Words and Brevity, and discuss guidelines (based on Barbara Abercrombie's "Courage and Craft" and the instructor's own experiences writing for newspapers, regional magazines and public radio. We'll do writing exercises/write off various prompts, and get ideas for getting our work out into the world.
Instructor: Judah Leblang
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday-Sunday, October 15-16th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Line-By-Line
John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is the perfect novel. Each line is a model of economy, crafted with precision. On the first day of this class, we'll explore how Steinbeck structured his work to ensure each scene, every last line, had a purpose, and how it all came together to support one of the most memorable endings in literature. The following day, we'll apply the lessons learned from Steinbeck to the students' own work. Students should come to class with the novel, having read it beforehand, and email up to ten pages of their work-in-progress to be shared with the class.
Instructor: Amy MacKinnon
$220/$195 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, October 15th, 10:00am-5:00pm, I’ve Just Got to Write About This. . . But Now What?
Find yourself with a great story to tell—but not sure whether you want to write it as memoir or fiction? Writers before you have faced this challenge, and in this class we’ll look at work by people like John Edgar Wideman and Kathryn Harrison, who turned events in their own lives into both memoir and autobiographical fiction. We’ll look closely at the way the chosen form changed the story, and discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of writing in each form. We’ll then use these writers as inspiration for our own work, trying our hand in class at writing stories from our own lives into both memoir and fiction, and discussing what the process tells us. Students will leave class with a better understanding of their own levels of comfort with the risk and invention possible in each form and with a greater appreciation of all the possibilities inherent in their stories.
Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Sunday, October 16th, 10:00am-4:00pm, How to Complete a Great First Draft of Your Book
Everyone has a story within them, but the vast majority of working writers today, even someone like Stephen King, never succeeded in getting their first book into print. That first book resides permanently in a drawer, a so-called “practice novel.” The good news is that, by answering certain crucial questions at the outset, you can avoid the trap of a practice novel. This class is perfect for people with an idea for a book, fiction or non-fiction. We will test our book ideas against a series of crucial questions that you will be grateful you considered before you finished your draft.
Instructor: Peter Mountford
$100/$85 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Sunday, October 16th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Not Worlds Apart: The Art of Literary Translation
There is plenty of fantastic literature around the world that Americans never get to read because it is never translated. If you've studied a foreign language, however, then you know that translation is not such a simple task: for some words there is no exact counterpart, idioms are often completely different (not to mention grammatical structures), and subtlety of meaning is easily lost. In this workshop we will explore the difficulties and questions posed by translation (prose and poetry) but which can only be answered by diving in and getting your hands dirty. And the payoffs are tremendous. As one renowned writer has said, “The only way to truly understand a foreign work is to translate it.” As novelist Richard Powers notes, the aim of translation is "to show what else, other than homegrown sentences, a language might be able to say." So come explore this noble and satisfying art, not only expanding your own understanding of a work and your toolbox for your own writing, but infusing something important into our often blindingly dominant language and culture. Note: At least moderate proficiency in a foreign language (past or present: it comes back pretty quickly) required. Participants should also start looking for and bring to class a piece of literature (a story, essay, or some poems) from their preferred language that they are interested in translating, as well as a good XlanguageX-English dictionary.
Instructor: Eric Grunwald
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Sunday, October 16th, 10:00am-5:00pm, How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book: Section B
Books often start with a simple yearning to explore new territory: fascinating topics, characters who won’t leave you alone, a good story. But manuscripts get unwieldy, fast. One out of ten writers never finish their manuscripts because most first-time book writers get lost without good structure and planning. Mary Carroll Moore, award-winning author of 13 books in three genres and a PEN/Faulkner nominee, will guide you through a simple and successful book-writing process that can take your book from idea to publication, a process using a three-act structure that eases organization and makes a manuscript vivid and engaging to readers. Find out why Aristotle believed that three acts formed a perfect structure for all stories, why humans lean toward beginning, middle, and end, and why we crave the emotional catharsis of that format in literature too. For all levels of writers working on nonfiction, memoir, or novels, at any stage from seed idea to draft. Learn why strong structuring is the key to selling a book in today's competitive publishing industry.
Instructor: Mary Carroll Moore
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Sunday, October 16th, 10:00am-5:00pm, The Unreliable Narrator in Fiction
Your narrator, H—, suddenly kills his best friend, having carried on for years with said friend’s wife, and now must not only explain his crime, but explain, at that, why he had no other option. Or maybe H—, having killed his friend, has no memory of committing the crime in the first place, and must piece together from the wife’s testimony the sordid events that led him to it. Or perhaps H— has not killed his friend at all, yet still feels compelled to confess the “crime” to said friend’s surviving widow for reasons even he is unsure of himself. So deepens the rabbit-hole of first, third and even second-person narrative unreliability, perfected by Nabokov, meta-fictionalized by McEwan, diagnosed by Lydia Davis, and expanded by you. This one-night seminar will languish in the details of voice, interiority and the way in which a story is told in order to render what is going on behind and beneath the sentences as much or even more important than the sentences themselves.
Instructor: Adrian Van Young
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Sunday, October 16th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Epiphany and a Side Order of Meaning
If only it were as simple as ordering off a menu. Elevating our work from the personal to the universal—to some larger meaning that has your readers shaking their head in recognition and in amazement at your grand wisdom—can feel daunting. In this seminar geared toward writers of personal essay and memoir, we’ll examine the work of authors who do it well, such as Bernard Cooper, Joan Didion, Abigail Thomas and others. We’ll discuss ways of working and revising that can help you unlock your own personal truths, and we'll try our hand at different writing exercises designed to get you working in that direction.
Instructor: Amy Yelin
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
SEMINAR: Friday, October 21st, 11:00am-2:00pm, Find Your Memoir
Finding the heart of your memoir can be vexing. What story do you want to tell? How do you tell it? How can you make your reader care about your life? This seminar will help writers who are beginning to write a memoir (or want to write a memoir) find a shape and form for their story. We will discuss how to narrow and frame your life experiences in memoir, and examine some common structures for telling the story, with the goal of ultimately helping you find the heart of what story to tell. Quick exercises will help you "map" your memoir's scope --- the time frame, theme, plot, character arc, and key moments. We will discuss chronological time vs. narrative time, and dilemmas of "truth" and memory as it relates to recovering and recreating the past. Please bring a brief and rough (under 300 word) summary of a real or potential memoir project.
Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
SEMINAR: Friday, October 21st, 11:00am-2:00pm, First Time Children's Book Authors/First Publications
Are you a new children’s book author, longing for the days when you see your name in print? In this seminar, editor/agent Maribeth Sanabria, whose clients include Grub’s own Beth Raisner Glass, will help you lay a foundation for getting your first publication credit. This seminar is designed for the beginning writer who has put pen to paper, but is unsure what to do next. From organization and tracking tips, to current market news, she will offer a nuts-and-bolts overview of the editor/agent stage of the process (submissions policies, cover letter writing, etc.) and take your questions on the burgeoning world of children’s book publishing. Tuition includes editorial review of first page of one of your manuscripts.
Instructor: Maribeth Sanabria
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, October 22nd, 10:00am-5:00pm, Plotting the Novel
Starting with Aristotle and working through three contemporary authors’ ideas about plotting, this course will offer several plot forms to help you rethink your novel’s structure and the vital connection between character and plot.
Instructor: Michelle Hoover
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, October 22nd, 10:00am-5:00pm, Developing Family Members as Characters
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!
Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, October 22nd, 10:00am-5:00pm, Get Unstuck: How to Fix, Patch, and Improve Your Plot
This one-day seminar covers the fundamentals of plotting and character development, with an eye toward getting past those "sticking points" that often slow the writing process. Every student will have their novel's structure analyzed, picked apart, and put back together. Participants must have a novel-length work underway--this is not designed for the beginning writer who "has an idea" and wants to shape it. This is also not designed for sensitive types. It's plumbing, folks. Prepare to hammer, solder, and sweat.
Class limited to 8. Please bring a 1-page plot synopsis, a list of characters, and three things you hate MOST about your current project.
Instructor: Micah Nathan
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now. Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Be sure to check out our website for a comprehensive view of upcoming events.
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.
--FESTIVAL: Saturday, October 15th, all day, Boston Book Festival
Don't miss the annual Boston Book Festival, happening all day in and around Copley Square, with Michael Ondaatje as keynote this year. Grub Street will be leading nine workshops throughout the day and the "Writer Idol" event at 10:30am. The workshops are free but do require advance registration, so click here to reserve a spot.
--SEMINAR: Monday, October 17th, 6:30-8 pm, Maximize Your Self-Publishing Royalties: A talk by Larry Blumsack
Learn how to combine Lightning Source, CreateSpace and Espresso into a self-publishing power tool. Also, come hear about the benefits of voice-recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking. Whether you're a professional writer concerned about carpal tunnel syndrome or a person recording a family oral history, voice-recognition software can be a great tool. For more information: http://nwuboston.org/events/blumsack.htm
Sponsored by the National Writers Union Boston Chapter.
FREE, Brookline Public Library (Hunneman Room), 361 Washington Street, Brookline.
--READING: Tuesday, Oct 18th, 7PM, Julia Glass and David Rowell
Julia Glass, author of The Widower's Tale, and David Rowell, author of The Train of Small Mercies. http://www.newtonvillebooks.com.
FREE, Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newton.
--READING EVENT: Thursday, October 20th, 6:30pm, National Reading Group Month
Women’s National Book Association Boston hosts National Reading Group Month on Thursday, October 20, 6:30 p.m. at . The event features an author panel, publisher giveaways and autographed books for sale. Panelists are Jennifer Haigh, author of Faith, Daphne Katolay, author of Russian Winter, and Ilene Beckerman, author of The Smartest Woman I Know. Panel moderated by Edith Pearlman, author of Binocular Vision.
$20 for WBNA members; $25 for nonmembers. Hotel 140 in the library, 140 Clarendon Street, Boston. For more information contact Katherine Dibble at kkdibble@gmail.com.
--WORKSHOP: Mondays at 7:30pm Write Down Creative Workshop
This is a creative collaborative workshop, designed to jumpstart your creativity, whether you’re an experienced writer or you’ve been afraid to set words to paper (or screen) until now. We will write new material together, present it, discuss it, revise, and reinvent in a supportive, humorous, and open environment. Songwriters, poets, essayist, playwrights, bloggers, memoirists, and writers of every stripe are welcome. Artists, dancers, storytellers, musicians, and actors are also welcome to come and learn how writing can enhance and inform other art forms. Everyone is a writer and everyone has a story to tell. Come and find your voice, break through blocks, light your fire, and get some fresh new work out on the page. Please bring your favorite writing materials.
http://www.facebook.com/WalnutStreetCafe
FREE, Walnut Street Café, Lynn, MA
--CONTEST: Soul-Making Contest
Three Boston area Grub members, Jamie Cat Callan, Tara Masih, and Kathy Handley, are involved with the National League of American Pen Women, Nob Hill Branch, annual Soul-Making Contest. It was created to encourage, support, and validate a diversity of creative expressions and honor all others who do the same. Categories include Short Story, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Novel Excerpt, Flash Fiction, Memoir, Young Adult Poetry and Prose, Humor, and Intercultural Essay. Date for Award ceremony is March 25, 2012. DEADLINE: November 30. Check website for details: www.soulmakingcontest.us.
--CALL FOR WRITERS: New Paris Press
Grubstreet alumnus Leslie Schultz has just launched New Paris Press, an online magazine covering the culture and politics of New England. The current issue includes the work of Grub buddies Steve Almond and Henriette Lazaridis Power, and the poetry of David Surette. She is looking for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from New England writers. Email her at newparispressfb@gmail.com if you have story ideas or work to share. She really wants to hear from you!
Welcome to the end of the e-mail, where like a passion for plum pudding, we offer you the chance to win a prize. Does the cliché "making a Frankenstein" make any sense? Email your answer to whitney@grubstreet.org. The first correct respondent wins a Starbucks gift card for a coffee treat.
Last's week's trivia: Orwell reversed the last two digits of 1948, the year he wrote most of 1984, in order to show that within a single generation, democracy and freedom could be obliterated. Winner: Cat Martin.
