Stories Goes Kindle
The Stories book has gone Kindle and, truth to tell, I’ve mixed feelings about that.  Books as objects—with pages that turn, that can be stuffed into the meshed pockets of backpacks, that show the wear and tear of earnest reading—these I treasure.  And have since I first worried my Dick & Jane reader to pieces. Nothing calms like being among books—in bookstores, libraries, in my modest studio apartment.  All those stories, great thoughts, and comforting humor.  I’ve likely bought, sold, borrowed, and lent more books than is rational.  Then of course

A Sliver of Ice in the Heart
Graham Greene has been quoted as saying that writers have—or must have—“ a sliver of ice in the heart.”   It sounds ominous, but all it really means is that writers use the material from their lives in their work, whether fiction, poetry, personal essay, or memoir.  In doing so, they stand a bit apart from their lives, always observing, thinking about how their experiences might be transformed into something artful.   This reminds me of what I once read about James Thurber who, while at a cocktail party, stood alone by the hors d’oeuvre table, looking out onto the assembled guests. 

How To Get a Writing Gig
Easy, show up with some beer. People who know me know my fondness for beer, preferably lager, chilled, and straight from the bottle.  I’ve written about the story of beer for this blog, and about its relationship to the invention of writing.   And so I was pleased to learn recently of yet another connection between beer and writing. From the November 9 issue of The Writer’s Almanac: The first issue of Rolling Stone

It's All in the Art
From a recent NYT review of Mary Karr's latest memoir Lit:"Lit is a story of addiction and recovery, by now familiar in outline from the many A.A.-like autobiographies produced during the memoir craze of the late ’90s. Whereas many of these lesser efforts were propelled by the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art, Ms. Karr’s own work demonstrates that candor and self-revelation only become literature when they are delivered with hard-earned craft, that the exposed life is not the same as the examined one."Or as British wr

WORD DRUNK
The other day, while making lunch and listening to the radio—a program on Middle East politics—the guest, whose name I never got, used the adjective “pusillanimous” when describing John Kerry’s position on the topic under discussion. I was startled—even if this was NPR—that this word fell so easily and naturally out of the guest’s mouth.  I stopped what I was doing and went straight to the first of my three reference books, The Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus (2nd edition) to look up the word’s meaning, though I’d guessed at it from the conte