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.
On January 2, a collection of T. S. Eliot’s letters to his close friend Emily Hale became available for research for the first time, shedding new light on the pair’s complex and mysterious relationship. In one correspondence from November 1930, Eliot wrote, “I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead.” Previously, the archive of 1,131 letters had been sealed at the direction of Hale, who specified that it should only be opened fifty years after both she and Eliot had died. (Guardian)
In a conversation at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Staceyann Chin talks queerness, imagination, and the magic of public readings: “On stage, you have a conversation with people and you get to hear it out loud in a way you can’t when you’re inside of your own house by yourself.”
Courtney Maum recommends eight podcasts that help inform how she writes and revises. Thinking about the possibility of live storytelling will improve one’s writing on the page, she contends. Highlights include Minorities in Publishing and Between the Covers. (Electric Literature)
Maum featured in Ten Questions from Poets & Writers Magazine in July last year.
“When you’re young, your parents are so elemental, and at a certain point they move from elements to humans.” Nicholas Mancusi talks to the Rumpus about the complex family dynamics in his debut novel, A Philosophy of Ruin.
Robert Hass features in the latest installment of By the Book. He shares the many titles on his nightstand, and the three writers, living or dead, he’d invite to a literary dinner party. (New York Times)
The latest pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, is Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir, Heart Berries. Heart Berries concerns Mailhot’s life growing up on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in Canada.
“Fundamentally, the structure is a cheat.” Miranda Popkey discusses constructing her debut novel, Topics of Conversation, from a series of short stories. (Nerd Daily)
Jane Ciabattari notes ten books to look forward to in 2020, including Laura van den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Verge. (BBC)
Verge was featured in the very first installment of a new series from Poets & Writers Magazine: GalleyCrush.
