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:
Eleven-year-old Marley Dias has launched a book drive to collect a thousand books with black girl protagonists by February 1. The campaign—known on social media as #1000blackgirlbooks—grew out of Dias’s frustration with her school’s reading list: “I was sick of reading about white boys and dogs.” After the deadline, Dias plans to host a book fair in St. Mary, Jamaica, where her mother grew up, and donate the titles to low-resource libraries in the area. (Colorlines)
Scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Poland recently analyzed sentence patterns of more than a hundred classic works of literature—from Dickens to Joyce to Shakespeare—and found that an “overwhelming majority” of the texts seem to construct fractal patterns that resemble mathematical arrangements found in nature. Researcher Stanisław Drożdż said the findings suggest that these writers “had a kind of intuition, as it happens to great artists, that such a narrative mode best reflects ‘how nature works’ and they properly encoded this into their texts. Nature evolves through cascades and thus arranges fractally, and imprints of this we find in the sentence-length variability.” (Guardian)
Books in the public domain have had makeovers; not in content, of course, but in cover design. The Creative Action Network, a startup that crowdsources artwork to support social causes and artists, started a project called Recovering the Classics, in which hundreds of artists redesigned covers of books in the public domain. The Creative Action Network has recently launched its 50 x 50 campaign, which aims to display the new covers in schools and libraries across the country. The group hopes the exhibit will renew interest in reading the classic texts. (Wired)
At Full Stop, poet Laura Mullen talks about her first hybrid prose memoir, Complicated Grief, and how writing can push against conventions of female beauty and fears about aging: “I am as sure as I can be that in opening an acceptance of our minds (by way of writing that is not slavishly or even politely imitative, immediately market-friendly, or genre-safe) we will be helped to come to further acceptance of and joy in our bodies in all their manifestations.”
According to a new survey of diversity in the publishing industry in the United States and Canada, straight white women account for the majority of editorial positions. The survey, conducted by Lee & Low Books, reveals that the publishing industry is 79 percent white, 78 percent women, and 88 percent straight. (Electric Literature)
“I don’t believe in inspiration at all. We live in a world that demands explanation. And fiction has the capability to offer explanations for things. I work with history because I come from a country that has a tremendous thirst for reality. It is desperate to understand what the hell happened in recent years.” Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue discusses his writing process and his first book translated into English, Sudden Death, which comes out February 9 from Riverhead. Enrigue has previously published six novels in Spanish. (New York Times)
Skipping tonight’s Republican debate? Have a little fun instead with the U.S. Political Poetry Generator. The bot generates poems using the transcripts from the latest Republican and Democratic presidential debates as well as hundreds of classic poetry lines. Pick a candidate, poet, and verse style, and generate some interesting, if not beautiful, poems. (Quartz)
