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:
“The real problem is that writing, unlike speaking, is an unnatural act.” Author and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker discusses the ongoing debates over the rules of writing, and responds to the mixed reactions he received for his latest book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. (Guardian)
On October 14, U.K. publisher the Folio Society will release a collector’s edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which will include an introduction from Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. (Flavorwire)
In an interview series with writers of rural fiction, Bonnie Jo Campbell talks about her process, nostalgia versus reality in rural fiction, and her new story collection, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters (Norton). (Fiction Writers Review)
At the Boston Review, Stephen Burt considers the legacy of nineteenth-century British poet John Clare. “Almost everything that could have seemed, to a nineteenth-century reader, like a reason to count Clare as minor, or not to read him, makes him a resource for poets today.”
Using the theft of Flannery O’Connor’s Kenyon Review archives as an example, rare book theft expert Travis McDade writes of the greater danger facing American literary archives. (Literary Hub)
Hollywood’s portrayal of “the writing mentor” is often a figure riddled with addiction and loneliness. Leah Schnelbach looks at on-screen versions of the “terrible” writing mentor and why students are drawn to them. (Electric Literature)
Novelists and psychologists have much to teach each other about storytelling. Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s new book, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy, chronicles the author’s five-year correspondence with psychologist Arabella Kurtz. (New Republic)
