Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2010

Shop Talk |

The next generation

by Lee Thomas

The San Francisco WritersCorps program places professional writers in community settings to teach creative writing to youth. Like the 826 programs around the U.S., Red Beard Press in Ann Arbor, or Voices Behind Walls in El Paso, TX and Las Cruces, NM, WritersCorps works with young people to hone their writing skills – poetry, fiction, memoir, song writing – as a means of creative power and self-expression. This year, WritersCorps won a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award for their work with young people. From their website: WritersCorps, a project of the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San […]


Reviews |

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, Second Edition, by Betsy Lerner

by Stephanie Vanderslice

After its publication in 2000, the first edition of Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers became one of my students’ favorite writing books, and over time it became my go-to gift to graduating seniors with whom I’d formed a special bond, and whose persistence I hoped to bolster in those daunting years ahead. I even kept a small stash of copies in my office. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to this second edition, published in October 2010.


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Thursday morning candy: Smokelong Quarterly

by Lee Thomas

Here’s where my November resolution to read War and Peace over the last two weeks of December begins to look like so much bluster and brim. I’ve never been a huge fan of New Year’s Resolutions for this very reason: the likelihood of failure feels like the hulking beast perched atop the crumbling overhang of the dainty little ledge where I contemplate things like “finish two stories a month.” BUT, have I got an easy resolution for you: in 2011, read more flash fiction. What’s not to love? You can finish reading it before your coffee gets cold, you can […]


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New Skiff, likely to include the ads

by Lee Thomas

We’ve all known it’s coming, but it seems it is now just a matter of time before ads start showing up in e-readers of all stripes. The Hearst corporation’s “Skiff,” an e-reader they plan to debut at the Consumer Electronics Show (Jan 7 – 10, 2011). Website eReader Chat is skeptical about the viability of the Skiff taking off in an already crowded e-reader marketplace, but notes: Just about the only thing about the Skiff that really strikes me as intriguing is the partnership they’ve inked with Nielsen and comScore to handle advertising analytics for the device. Presumably, they’ll be […]


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Book of the Week: Elegies for the Brokenhearted, by Christie Hodgen

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: John Horniblow, Maggie Hess, and David Littlejohn. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Elegies for the Brokenhearted, by Christie Hodgen. Published this year by W.W. Norton, Elegies is Hodgen’s third book. She is also the author of the novel Hello, I Must be Going, and the story collection A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw, which won the […]


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Copyrights, contracts, and clarity – oh my!

by Lee Thomas

Ever wonder how to read a contract? What an agent can do for your manuscript? How to protect the copyright or trademark of your work? These aren’t necessarily things you learn in a fiction workshop. If you live in the Boston area, Grub Street has an evening seminar designed to answer just these sorts of questions. Here’s the skinny: SEMINAR: Monday, January 10th, 6:30-9:30pm, Everything a Writer Needs to Know about the Law This course will provide writers at all stages in their career with a basic understanding of what they need to know about the law. Attorneys Jenny Milana […]


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Beautiful Bindings

by Lee Thomas

As usual, my holiday shopping consisted of lots of hours lost in bookstores, just browsing around, and finding at least as many books that I wanted, as I did books for friends and family. Yep, I’m a bit of a one-trick pony on the gift front – the equivalent of an aunt who always gives hankies. Usually I’m on the hunt for specific things, so my head isn’t all that turned by covers, but this year I couldn’t help but notice the attention to aesthetics that many of the houses are putting into their bindings. Here are some favorites. Europa […]


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Thursday morning candy: Narrative

by Lee Thomas

Family driving you to bunker down in the spare room with your laptop? Never fear! Narrative magazine’s Winter 2011 Issue is up. You can read a six word story by Sherman Alexie that will probably make you feel like your own family isn’t so nuts. You can read three prize-winning tales from Narrative‘s Spring Contest. Fiction, cartoons, poetry, nonfiction – a rich collage of storytelling, right there for the enjoying. I’ll stop rattling on, and let you get to it. Maybe the stories you read will provide some fodder for dinner-table discussion? You never know.


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No flack from Chuck

by Lee Thomas

Anyone with a television set (by no means a given anymore) and network reception (ditto), has probably not escaped the fact that this is Oprah’s last season. Her most recent Book Club selection – announced during her show featuring Jonathan Franzen, post-controversy – were not one, but two novels by Charles Dickens. The Oprah Book Club paperback version combining A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, clocks in at a whopping 848 pages (oh, the serial novelist!). Oprah has picked classics in the past, East of Eden, As I Lay Dying, and Anna Karenina have made the list. At […]




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