Posts by author
Katie O’Brien
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The Past and Present of Banned Books
‘Banned books’ sounds like a thing of the past. But over at Lit Hub, Amy Brady details the ways that the fight against censorship continues in libraries and schools today: If school administrators are attempting to limit even elective reading,…
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Writing = Work = Job
Settling the debate about whether “writer” is job that arose with Merritt Tierce’s Marie Claire essay about going broke post-debut novel, and a response piece by Ester Bloom at The Billfold calling writing a hobby, Lincoln Michel finds a middle ground between…
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The End of the Road
At The Establishment, Anne Theriault recounts driving out West to see the house of her childhood heroine Laura Ingalls, and what it taught her about the horrific underpinnings of the American Dream: And then we passed a mural with a…
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The Post-Ferguson Classroom
Here is the thing: silence does not protect us; in fact it suffocates us. Marcia Chatelain, professor, author, and originator of #thefergusonsyllabus, discusses the importance of talking about race in high school and college classrooms in Lenny Letter.
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A Living, Tweeting Dictionary
Following a viral Twitter interaction about whether the dictionary is adapting too much to new trends in language, Merriam-Webster reassures everyone that language changes over time, and that’s okay.
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Not Enough Buzz to Go Around
At Lit Hub, Ilana Masad outlines the importance of publicists in generating buzz for new books in a social media saturated-environment, and the struggle many authors face to generate their own publicity at small presses without the resources to do more:…
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Woman’s Best Friend
At The Establishment, Laura Bogart writes a heartwarming ode to her the special type of love that exists only between human and canine—the kind of love she says she’s always been searching for: Together, we built a life from endless…
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Handling Rejection from the Other Side
I never heard editors talk about how disturbed and insecure writers might become as a result of relentless rejection, living every day with what James Salter called “the feeling of injustice.” It was more fun for editors to characterize their…
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Disliked Words around the World
Sworn haters of the word ‘moist,’ now is your chance to be heard. Oxford Dictionaries has launched a worldwide vote to find English language speakers’ least favorite word, the Guardian’s Alison Flood reported. Other top contenders include “no,” “like,” and…
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What’s in a Name?
The power of names is intricately woven into the fabric of our identities. At The Establishment, Jené Gutierrez recounts an argument with her editors over using the correct rendering of bell hooks’s name, and how language has historically functioned as…
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Keep Minor Characters Minor
At the Guardian, Charlotte Jones takes issue with the recently announced Pride and Prejudice sequel fleshing out the life of Mary Bennett—a character whose neglect is central to Austin’s plot: The singularity of Elizabeth Bennett, after all – the reason…
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Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be
We’ve all lent a book to someone and never gotten it back—and most of us have probably been on the other end of that exchange as well. For Read It Forward, Jonathan Russell Clark writes a manifesto against the somewhat sacred…