Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
“I have been writing to impress old white men. Countless decisions I’ve made about what to write and how to write it have been in acquiescence to the opinions of the white male literati. Not only acquiescence but a beseeching, approval seeking, people pleasing.” At Tin House, fiction writer Claire Vaye Watkins argues against writing that panders to a white male audience and for writing stories that refuse categorization. “Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories.”
From novels with accompanying apps to interactive sites that upload novels in progress, the Economist takes a look at the future of interactive fiction.
Last week, a court in Saudi Arabia ordered the execution of Palestinian artist and poet Ashraf Fayadh for renouncing Islam. The Guardian reports that Fayadh is a “key member of the British-Saudi art organization Edge of Arabia.” The court order was said to have been prompted by his 2008 poetry collection, Instructions Within, which Fayadh said was “just about me being [a] Palestinian refugee…about cultural and philosophical issues. But the religious extremists explained it as destructive ideas against God.” Fayadh has thirty days for an appeal.
Following the recent attacks in Paris, writer and critic Luc Sante discusses his new book about the city’s radical tradition, The Other Paris, and what the effect of terrorism might have on the country. “I wanted to tell the story of what Louis Chevalier calls the ‘working and dangerous classes.’ Those are my people—my forebears on both sides all the way back, Belgian in my case but with many cultural points of similarity—and it also happens to be the aspect of Parisian life that American readers know the least about.”
The Believer features an interview with filmmaker, performance artist, and author Miranda July. July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man, was released this past year.
“The past appears overcrowded with public intellectuals, while in the present they seem scarce.” At the New York Times, writers Alice Gregory and Pankaj Mishra debate the fate of the public intellectual in the current “age of specialization.”
Alaskan Native poet Joan Naviyuk Kane talks to PBS NewsHour about how writing poetry in her Native Inupiaq language is a tool “against the misconceptions that exist about Native people in the U.S.—those that do not account for the reality of diverse, thriving Native cultures.”
