Laura Bogart, one-time-intern over at The Nervous Breakdown, has been coming into her own as a writer at breakneck speeds. Sometimes, the internet makes it easier to watch young writers grow in real-time, and when that happens it’s exciting as hell. Laura wrote this piece as a kind of homage to the achingly luminous Dear Sugar column, “Tiny Beautiful Things.” But the best homage to any writer who’s influenced you is to become a kick ass writer in your own right, and really that’s what Laura’s done.
Maybe this week’s theme is Youth. Patrick Somerville, featured today on The Sunday Rumpus, is only a few years older than Laura. Pat’s already on his fourth book, and is too shimmeringly brilliant to be called a “young writer” without it sounding limiting somehow. Here’s Pat making the scene on Newcity’s “Lit 50″ list. (P.S. I’m on here too.)
PEN USA’s call for submissions for their Literary Awards.
I want to start a little writing program in Querétaro, Mexico. My surrogate brother, Tom, and his partner Brad have a house there where they only live one month of the year. Faculty could sleep, host breakfasts, and hold workshops in the house. There’s a hot tub on the roof, overlooking all the church steeples, and a small but cool expat art scene in the city. Sweet, cheap hotels near the house where workshop participants could stay are plentiful. San Miguel de Allende is nearby and there are groovy hot springs. I’m obsessively planning–I want to launch next summer. I want to keep it affordable, cheaper than all the (really amazing, but fucking expensive) programs everyone wants to go to but can’t swing. It’s less than $300 to fly to Mexico City from Chicago most of the time, and you can take a comfortable, air-conditioned bus from there to QRO for something like 25 bucks. My worry is that Americans are terrified of Mexico right now, even though all the violence is actually happening in the border towns, and there’s less crime in QRO than in any American city I know of. Still, I’m concerned about this, because sometimes stereotypes have more legs than truth.
In the NYTimes: our man Steve Almond is ruining America.
Coming back to youth . . . Meredith Resnick’s been featuring various writers from Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience, on her blog The Writer’s [Inner] Journey. Here I talk about getting unstuck, as a writer, from the demons and tropes of my youth.
PW gives its Best Summer Books list, featuring Lydia Netzer, Martin Amis, Robert Goolrick, Jess Walter and more.
The &NOW Conference this year is in Paris. Today is the last day. If you’re reading this, then like me, you’re probably not there. Next year it’s in Boulder, CO. Yeah, I know, Boulder’s nice, but really, don’t you wish you’d gone THIS year? I know I do.
Well, okay, I don’t get to play the pity card about Paris. I’ll be there in a couple of weeks. I’m spending my birthday there, and my 19th wedding anniversary in the Loire Valley. My husband and I met in France, actually, at a train station in Avignon at 4am, in 1990. I was wearing a bowler hat like Sabina’s in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At that time, I thought I was going to be Sabina. It did not work out that way, to put it mildly. Though I’m not complaining.
Remember I was talking about serializations here on The Sunday Rumpus? We kick off our first one next week. Rob Roberge’s memoir-in-progress, Your Life in Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, will run in excerpts for 3 consecutive weeks while I’m in Europe. Don’t let the title fool you–well, okay, it won’t fool you: there’s plenty of sex, drugs and music in this work. But really it’s more about the relationship between memory and identity. Anyway, I want to do more serializations on Sundays. I’ve hit Rumpus friend Zoe Zolbrod up to do one soon too. Do you want to do a serialization? I’ll be honest: I probably have to be at least a little familiar with your work already, because I don’t have time to read blind submissions that are long enough to serialize. I don’t have, like, a “staff” or anything to help me with things like that, so sometimes I’m forced to be a little incestuous. But I’ve been an editor for 16 years, at four different publications, so the pool of writers I’m “at least a little familiar with” isn’t small. You know who you are, people. Get in touch. Really.
