Are you slogging through the fun of the job search? My friend Gerry Romano started a blog about life in those trenches and manages to find some good cheer in the process (along with much helpful advice): www.jobhuntingwithgerry.blogspot.com
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I was recently doing some research into colonies and residencies and was reminded once again of an amazing resource set up by DC’s own Kim Roberts, poet and editor of Beltway. Her listing includes every colony/residency for writers/visual artists known to humankind, neatly and geographically organized. A must! Check it out here: http://washingtonart.com/beltway/resid1.html
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Since this is a list, it only seems fitting to draw your attention to Yelizaveta P. Renfro’s piece for Glimmer Train about the importance of lists in her writing life:
“My stories and essays begin with lists. On whatever is at hand—and often in the margins or endpapers of books I'm reading—I jot down fragments in the order that my mind offers them. This first step is a purging of these pieces, without structure. It's notating in shorthand what will go in the container, whether the container is an essay or a story. Usually, I fill more than one container at a time. Sometimes the contents get mixed. That's OK; I shuffle them about later. The items of each list are the bones, gaunt and bare, excavated from the mind. The work of assembling the skeleton and fleshing it with sinew and cartilage, fat and skin, comes later, once the frame has ossified.”
Read the rest here: http://www.glimmertrain.com/b55renfro.html
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And The Quivering Pen offers this bold and hopeful story about how novelist Katharine Weber successfully rejected The New Yorker’s rejection of her story:
“I had been rejected by numerous publications in the past, but I felt wronged by this particular form rejection in a new way. I was possessed of an uncanny certainty that The New Yorker’s slush pile reader’s passing over “Friend of the Family” was a mistake. And so I did the thing I had never done before, the thing you are never, ever supposed to do: I simply submitted it all over again, with no acknowledgment of the rejection.”
Read the rest here: http://davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-first-time-katharine-weber.html
