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:
“Enough books have been banned and writers attacked in the recent past for us to start asking ourselves, why are the values implicit in literary writing—ambiguity and open-endedness but also plain truth-telling—becoming so hard to take?” Public Books hosts a roundtable discussion with Indian writers Githa Hariharan, Arunava Sinha, and Anjum Hasan about the challenges of being a writer and publisher amidst India’s political upheavals and censorship.
Acclaimed novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson looks back at the history of the American public education system and makes a defense to save American public university institutions. (Harper’s)
The ghost of Mark Twain stirred up séance-level madness in 1917, when the novel Jap Herron—said to have been dictated by Twain from beyond the grave—was published. The publication set off a posthumous publishing battle over copyright: “Can the law recognize a dead person as the author of a new work? And if so, could Twain’s ghost (or its human mouthpiece) wiggle out of Twain’s agreement with Harper & Brothers to publish all of his books?” (Fusion.net)
At the Atlantic, two professors of language and literature analyze the ways in which MFA programs have influenced the contemporary American novel.
Poetry lovers in the Seattle area: Looking for a new business venture? John Marshall, longtime owner of Seattle’s Open Books bookstore—one of the few poetry-only bookstores in the U.S.—recently announced his decision to retire and sell the poetic haven. Inquiries to purchase the store have come in, but no deals have been made. Marshall hopes the future owner will “carry the store to the next phase with some grace and certainty.” (Stranger)
At the Guardian, Hanya Yanagihara, author of the acclaimed novel A Little Life, considers what it means to be a “brave” fiction writer. “Not that a novel needs to disturb or dismay or unsettle in order to mesmerize or provoke, but it does, or should, force us to reconsider, to rethink. The fiction writer’s bravery, then, is her dedication to never second-guessing the reader, even at the risk of her own book’s likability; the reader’s bravery is allowing himself to trust the writer, to surrender himself to the world she has created.”
PEN American has launched a new initiative called the PEN Equity Project, dedicated to “addressing the lack of equity in publishing for writers and publishing professionals of color.” The first post in the Equity Project initiative is a roundtable discussion focusing on identity formation in children’s books, and practical ways to create tangible changes in the diversity of children’s publishing. (Publishers Weekly, PEN.org)
Over at Salon, best-selling author Cheryl Strayed interviews fiction and nonfiction writer Rob Roberge about his debut memoir, Liar, the challenges shifting from fiction to nonfiction for the first time, and his process of composition. Liar was published last month by Crown.
