The iconic short story writer and essayist Grace Paley died yesterday at her home in Vermont. I have long been an admirer of her work, and have been such a disciple that my students over the years have probably become bored with the refrain, “If you want to learn how to write dialogue, read Grace Paley!” I first read Paley in 1993, while living alone in a miserable little duplex in Knoxville, TN. I’d just accepted a job as a copywriter at an ad agency. I remember being snowed in during my first scheduled week of work, reading Paley...
Monthly Archives: August 2007
Katharine Anne Porter Prize & other Awards
A prize of $1,000 and publication by the University of North Texas Press is given annually for a collection of short fiction. Submit a manuscript of 100 to 200 pages with a $20 entry fee by August 29. Visit the Web site for complete guidelines. Glimmer Train Press Short Fiction Award: A prize of $1,200 and publication in Glimmer Train Stories is given twice yearly for a short story. Online submissions are encouraged. Submit a story of no more than 3,000 words with a $15 entry fee by July 31. Details here. Creative nonfiction contests: The Hunger Mountain Creative...
Housing Market Soft? Not in San Francisco
There’s lots of talk these days about the softening housing market. But in San Francisco, here’s one bit of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. My husband and I saw a beautiful three-story house in the Outer Richmond during its first and only open house on Sunday, two days ago. The house has sweeping views of the ocean and Golden Gate Park, and unlike the vast majority of homes in the city, the house is freestanding, i.e. detached on both sides. We fell in love. I imagined writing books in the light-filled upper room, watching the sunset over the ocean...
Reading Monday, Aug 20
I’ll be reading and discussing THE YEAR OF FOG on Monday, August 20, at the Sunset Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. 7:00 p.m. 1305 18th Avenue, at Irving.
lists
Today I came across a poem by an old friend, JoLee Passerini, in the Crab Orchard Review. Back when I knew her, almost twenty years ago at the University of Alabama, she was JoLee Gibbons. We worked on the Marrs Field Journal together. That was when we all were getting our first tastes of literary possibility; it’s always nice to open a literary journal and come across the name of one of my friends from the undergraduate years in Tuscaloosa. Here’s the first stanza from her poem, “Eating Locusts”: Grommet, socket, sprocket, marriage– lugnuts, lugwrench, stopwatch, truckstop, egret, lake...
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
Stop dreaming, start writing!
