Editor’s note: At AWP 2012, which just wrapped up in Chicago, we were thrilled to hear this wonderful story from one of our contributors, Sarah Van Arsdale, and are delighted to share it with you. It’s a reminder of what conferences are really about: fostering community to buoy a writer’s spirit, helping you hang [...]
So you’re not at AWP right now, and you’re wondering what kind of highjinks you’re missing? I can promise you, you’re not missing anything as fun as the sessions on Full Stop’s mock AWP schedule, which I must confess looks way more exciting than the original. Here are the sessions I’d be attending [...]
We here at Fiction Writers Review are excited to hit AWP and catch up with our friends and contributors.
All throughout the conference, you can find us at our Bookfair table (N16)—come by and say hi!
And here’s a partial list of FWR-related events:
Thursday, March 1st:
12 pm – “Beyond the Workshop”: Contributor Margaret Lazarus Dean and other [...]
Other than the addition of photocopying and the subtraction of cigarettes, creative writing workshop formats haven’t changed much since their earliest days. Is there a better way? Writer and teacher Liam Callanan reports on his experiments, and the legend that inspired them.
Sometimes all the talent and skill in the world are not enough to get a book written. Valerie Laken makes a case for coaching, not just teaching, young writers.
This week, we bring you not a traditional journal but Fresh Pressed, the biannual newsletter from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. CLMP is an organization dedicated to serving independent literary publishers, offering a biweekly e-newsletter, a literary journal circulation database template to help lit mags manage their records, workshops and roundtables, various [...]
In the final essay in our series on criticism, Keith Taylor recalls the pleasure of a “chance to review a new collection of poems in a place where several thousand people might read it, and to actually be paid something for our labors.” Has the Internet created room for “a more expansive tone to the discussion of contemporary poetry” – or made an already diminishing realm more clubby? Taylor’s experience as both poet and reviewer reveals the shaping potential of creating art and criticism.
This week we’re revisiting the 2011 AWP Conference in more ways than one. Yesterday we posted Jeremiah Chamberlin’s introductory talk for the AWP panel he moderated, “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com.” This morning, we posted Charles Baxter’s discussion of “Owl Criticism” from the same panel. Stay tuned for [...]
We continue our series on criticism with an essay by special guest Charles Baxter, who was a participant in the 2011 AWP conference panel “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com,” moderated by Jeremiah Chamberlin. Joining them were Stacey D’Erasmo, Gemma Sieff, and Keith Taylor. In his essay, Baxter writes that a trustworthy review has “a kind of doubleness: the reviewer manages to assert somehow that the book under discussion is of some importance for one reason or another; and second, a good review provides a formal description of the book’s properties, so that you could reconstruct it from the reviewer’s sketch of it.”
Earlier this month, Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin moderated a panel on criticism at the 2011 AWP Conference entitled “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com.” Joining him were Charles Baxter, Stacey D’Erasmo, Gemma Sieff, and Keith Taylor. In this essay, adapted from his talk at that panel, he discusses why liking a book should have nothing to do with a review, and how this thoughts on criticism have changed since running an independent bookstore.
