Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
“Writing is the wound, a site of pain that is also an involuntary threshold between inside and outside: autobiography—the ‘embarrassing I’—exposes that wound, where fiction might seem to bandage it.” Rachel Cusk on the journey of truth and self-realization in Yiyun Li’s nonfiction. (New York Review of Books)
In Madison, Wisconsin, bookseller Gretchen Treu has spearheaded #BookstoresAgainstBorders, a fund-raising campaign encouraging independent booksellers across the country to join her store, A Room of One’s Own, in donating a percentage of their holiday weekend sales to the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services in Texas. (Publishers Weekly)
“Getting feedback from too many sources can harm your writing process.” After asking book bloggers to stop tagging her in negative reviews, The Hate U Give author Angie Thomas has received a torrent of abuse. (Guardian)
Alaska governor Michael J. Dunleavy has slashed the University of Alaska’s budget by 41 percent, a move the state university’s president described as “devastating.” The university is home to two creative writing programs, one in Anchorage and one in Fairbanks. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meghan Daum talks about her new essay collection, The Problem With Everything, in which she looks at political activism, memes, feminism, and other social justice movements through the lens of a Gen-Xer. “There are a lot of scenes in the book where I’m just staring at my computer screen and basically going, ‘Are they crazy? Am I crazy? Or am I just old?’”
“He was a genial American eccentric, cultivating his own slant.” Dan Chiasson on the “higher utility” of weirdness in the late James Tate’s final poems. (New Yorker)
In what sources have described as the most expensive television deal in DC Entertainment history, Warner Bros. TV is set to produce a live-action adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s comic book series The Sandman for Netflix. (Hollywood Reporter)
“I was done with all the silences around women’s lives and bodies, so I wrote the book that I wanted—that I needed—to read.” Author and academic Emilie Pine surprised even her friends with the personal nature of her new essay collection, Notes to Self. (New York Times)
