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:
Jim Harrison, a prolific poet, novelist, and essayist, died on Saturday at age seventy-eight. Harrison is perhaps best known for his 1979 novel Legends of the Fall, which became a hit screen adaptation. Over the course of his career, Harrison wrote more than thirty books. At the New York Times, Margalit Fox writes that Harrison’s work explored “with ardent abandon the natural world, the life of the mind and the pleasures of the flesh."
Literary Hub features seven poems by Harrison in remembrance of his life and work.
Beginning this week, Ann Patchett’s Nashville, Tennessee–based independent bookstore Parnassus Books will send its new bookmobile, Parnassus on Wheels, out on the road. An article at the New York Times reports on the growing trend of bookmobiles, and how their arrivals in cities such as Nashville are a sign that independent bookstores are prospering.
At Forbes, writer Jennifer Baker reports on the continuing and crucial work of Marley Dias, the eleven-year-old girl who created the campaign #1000BlackGirlBooks. “[Dias] is not only a change agent and leader but also a direct representative of the demographic yearning for these titles. “[Dias] echoes that the consumer doesn’t always correlate to the protagonist, yet this visibility is important.” The GrassROOTS Community Foundation has released the #1000BlackGirlBooks Resource Guide, which includes a database of titles for teachers to utilize in their classrooms. To date Dias has collected almost five thousand books.
“All nations have founding myths. I suppose I would prefer to have a revolution in my country’s past than a monarchy…. But the truth is that local history has given way, in my lifetime, to global economics, and we have no good stories for this: no parades, no revolutions.” Irish writers Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Roddy Doyle, and others reflect on 1916 Easter rebellion. (Guardian)
Children’s author Beverly Cleary—creator of the beloved Ramona Quimby book series— will turn a hundred on April 12. In an interview with the Today Show, Cleary discusses her upcoming milestone birthday and reflects on her writing career, noting she is most proud of “the fact that children love my books.” (GalleyCat)
“Poetry is a way of burrowing beneath that veneer and getting to something a whole lot messier. And life is a very messy and complicated thing.” Poet Camille Rankine speaks about the intersection of poetry and music, emotional landscapes and histories, and her debut collection, Incorrect Merciful Impulses. (Interview)
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Darryl Pinckney talks about his new novel, Black Deutschland, the craft choices of the novel’s structure, what it means to be a marginalized writer, and universality in fiction writing: “When I was a student, there seemed to be the idea that blacks could write autobiography because the black experience was so powerful, but maybe we couldn’t do well in fiction (this was pre-Toni Morrison) because being black was such a limiting thing. But every story has universal meaning because each is dealing with the human problem. The specifics are what makes it interesting, and what makes it new.”
