It has been a great few weeks for uniformed statements about the book world. On June 1, The London Evening Standard reported that VS Naipaul declared all women writers unequal to him. He called women writers sentimental, claiming they have a narrow view of the world–a natural result, he says, of the fact that women are not the complete masters of their homes. This, of course, after having called post-colonial nations half-made societies. In many respects, I felt Naipual’s statements were beneath comment; they’re self-serving, self-aggrandizing baloney. How could anyone take such sweeping statements about all literature by women seriously?

But this week, I read another story that’s been sending ripples throughout the literary world: Meghan Cox Gurdon’s piece on Young Adult fiction, printed in the Wall Street Journal. With the garment-rending rhetoric I’d associate more with a temperance campaigner than with a book reviewer, Gurdon slams contemporary young adult fiction, scolds librarians for stocking shelves with books that deal with subjects like sexual abuse and self-harm, holds up to pillory an author who “makes free with language that can’t be reprinted a newspaper,” and, in some of the most overwrought language I think I’ve ever seen in a serious publication like The Wall Street Journal, claims that publishers attempt to “bulldoze coarseness or misery into children’s lives.” Read the rest of this entry »

Since last time, when I shared a 20-minute, time-saving recipe here on my blog, I’ve been thinking about the other ways we writers can make more time for the business of writing. Sometimes, when the rest of our lives are pared to the bone, it seems as though the only way to make more time would be to cut back hours on anything that does not constitute paid work: no more sleeping, no more eating, no more conversing with fellow humans. But that, friends, would be no way to live.

Those who know me well are familiar with my love/hate relationship with exercise. I love no longer being shaped like a Peeps Easter candy, and I love the sparkly and well-appointed gym I get to attend thanks to my husband’s work benefits (ah, that smell of chlorine in the air!), but I really hate taking time out of the day to go lurch around on various kinds of equipment. That’s time I could be writing, after all. In his On Writing, Stephen King commands writers to spend their workouts multi-tasking with a good book (really, he’s very serious about it), but I find that I become as motion-sick reading on the treadmill as I did when I was a small child riding in the back of my mom’s station wagon. (Sorry, Mr. King.) So I’ve been in the habit of cranking up the ipod to some inane dance music to distract me as the minutes tick away, all the while feeling guilty about the waste of my 60 minutes.

But recently, I came across a fantastic writing podcast, Writing Excuses, that has made me kinda-sort-partway eager to hit the gym. I hop on the elliptical machine, pull up a new issue of the podcast (or dig up an old issue from the very extensive archives), and suddenly, I’m multi-tasking. My pen may not be on paper, but my  mind is with my work. Writing Excuses may not have the world’s slickest-looking website, and the banter of the podcast’s hosts may even be a little corny from time to time. But Writing Excuses has become a major source of inspiration for me over the past few months, and has given me some fiction-writing tools I didn’t have before. Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned a while back, the folks at 32 Poems had a brilliant idea: writers sharing their healthy, 20-minute recipes as a way to share time-saving tips that make time for writing. Today, I’m sharing my contribution to the recipe pool with one of my favorite quick meals, Chili-Glazed Vegetable Tofu over Rice.

Okay. You’ve seen the word “tofu” here. A word about tofu: anyone who says he or she doesn’t like tofu hasn’t had the real deal. The weird, anemic looking block of whiteness that comes swimming in a plastic container full of water? Skip it. A trip to your local Asian market is more than worth it for the real thing, fresh from the producer. Fresh tofu should be firm to the touch, closer to eggshell than white in color, and should come wrapped simply in a piece of plastic–no strange tub of water needed. Here in the Seattle area, we’re lucky to have the famous Uwajimaya market, where the brand Chuminh tofu, which locally produced, is readily available all year.

This dish is a mainstay at the Davio house, because it’s not only quick to make and packed with nutrition, but it’s also delicious–our idea of comfort food. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s May. The month when many of my teacher friends are winding down their Spring semesters and turning in final grades, looking forward to well-earned vacation time. But because of the nature of my work (teaching English as a Second Language to teenagers), the times of year that are off-seasons for many are full-throttle seasons for me; my students (or their parents, in some cases) want to spend their summers, their Christmas breaks, their Spring breaks, their evenings, and just about any free time at all working on their language skills as they look ahead to college. So as others are wrapping up and embarking on new projects, trips, or even just a period of rest, I’m spreading out the books, updating syllabi, and prepping for what’s sure to be an intense summer (though I look forward, this year, to having my very first teaching assistant–ah, not to have to photocopy ever again!)

Tied to the fact that I’ll be teaching a heavy-duty schedule every day is what I consider the sad part of summer: this is the season during which I inevitably stop writing until September. I promise to make time around grading essays, prepping lessons, and writing daily progress reports. Around the inevitable strange germs I catch at least twice per summer. Around the combat fatigue of trying to explain that, yes, reading a book is important, and using online notes just isn’t going to cut it in my class.

But every summer, my resources in terms of time and energy seem depleted enough that I can’t dive into my manuscript for four or five hours at a shot with any kind of positive results. And I end up feeling guilty that I haven’t accomplished much, and feeling like a failure at my own management of my resources. But this year, I’m going to try to take a different approach: to remind myself that, to be a writer, I have to be a person, not merely a workhorse. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m taking a little break from my rather relentless posting about publishing and editing this week, because, well, a change is good now and then, right? Also, I’ve been dreaming a great deal.

All my life, I’ve dreamed as other people. Not of other people, but as them. Not myself in other circumstances, or even myself in different bodies, but as other people entirely. A four-year-old boy cleaning up after the animals on the family farm, a middle-aged trophy wife healing from plastic surgery, a young man going to work in a brightly lit office. And though it doesn’t happen every night, and it doesn’t happen in every dream, when I dream as other people, my thoughts, my moral coding, my own desires and beliefs are gone; I’m someone else entirely.

I didn’t realize this was strange until just a few years ago. In fact, I assumed that everyone had dreams like this at some time or another until I brought it up in conversation. As I was sitting around a lunch table with fellow students and a fiction teacher in my MFA program, chatting about using dream scenarios for fiction fodder, I mentioned dreaming as other people. My comments were met with perplexed stares and at least one “Wait, what are you talking about?” When I explained myself, the strange looks on everyone’s faces got even stranger. When I suggested that everyone must do this every once in a while, my teacher maintained that my experience was pretty darned unusual. (I didn’t then go into the fact that I have also died in my dreams–a scenario that I’ve often been told is impossible.) Read the rest of this entry »

The folks at 32 Poems have come up with a wonderful idea. In recognition of the fact that poets have to find ways to make time for their writing, but often have families that, well, need to be fed, 32 Poems is inviting poets to post their favorite 20-minute, healthy recipes on their blogs on May 20, 2011.  32 Poems will host a master list of all the participating blogs here.

As you may know, I’m a self-proclaimed foodie, and I may have trouble limiting myself to one recipe. I can’t wait to see what other writers have up their culinary sleeves as well, so I hope you’ll join me in participating!

Before I launch into my semi-regular hemming and hawing about all things writerly, I have to start this blog with the good news that’s had the internet buzzing today: poet Dean Young has undergone a successful heart transplant. He’s someone who’s been on my mind, and on the minds of many of his readers, and I’m so happy to hear that he’s on the road to wellness. I hope you’ll join me in sending good wishes to Mr. Young and his family, and to the family of the heart donor.

Okay. Now for the hemming and hawing. Using Submishmash (a great service that’s offered free of charge to publications like ours–how cool is that?) this reading period has been enlightening in a variety of ways–it’s made it easier to see what our acceptance rates really look like without spending a huge amount of time with a spreadsheet (hint: rates are far lower than you’d see on Duotrope.com), and how many submissions each genre is considering (several genres have nearly doubled in submissions since last issue. Wow.). One of the more interesting things Submishmash lets us do is handle withdrawals of pieces. Writers can withdraw work directly through the submissions manager, and the system sends an email to me to inform me of the withdrawal.

Can I just take a moment to note that all this talk of “withdrawal” is going to wreak havoc on my search engine traffic? I shudder. Moving on.

In the past, when we simply used email for submissions, I’d get an message every now and then from a poet who’d had a piece accepted somewhere else. I’d usually send them back an email saying “congrats, and we’ll keep the other poems under consideration.” No biggie, right? So it perplexed me when another editor friend would rail against writers withdrawing pieces. He felt pretty strongly that it was fundamentally unprofessional to withdraw materials, while I felt that, if an editor’s going to accept simultaneous submissions, she’d better expect a withdrawal here or there. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve mentioned before that working on the other side of the desk when it comes to the writing game (first in becoming an assistant at Fifth Wednesday, and later becoming an editor, then a managing editor at Los Angeles Review) has changed the way I as a writer look at the world of literary magazine publishing. In fact, there were a number of points of mystification for me when I was simply on the mailing-stuff-out side of the equation that have since become clear. For every perplexing guideline, question about how and when to withdraw a piece accepted elsewhere, or confusion over what the heck first North American rights meant, I’ve had a corresponding ah-ha! moment as an editor.

Sometimes it seems we editors get frustrated with writers because those writers aren’t giving us what we want, whether its with regard to formatting, the number of pieces in a submission, or querying about a submission’s status. It’s easy from an editor’s point of view to think that what we want to see from submitters must be pretty obvious. But, thinking back, I realize there are a number of things I would have liked to have known about when it came to submitting. I would have found it very helpful to have someone demystify some of the murky areas of this strange profession. So I thought I might take a blog post here and there to address some issues that inquiring writerly minds might want to know about.

First, let’s talk about region. Read the rest of this entry »

As a person who is committed to the pursuit of writing (or, to be more specific, to the holy trinity of the literary world: teaching, editing, and writing), I find that many of my friends and acquaintances, and certainly most of the people I interact with on a day to day basis, are committed to the same things as I am. This life spent at the keyboard, bent over sheaves of paper, wearing out one lucky editing pen at a time, and perhaps permanently ruining my posture…well, this is normal behavior for many people I know. But sometimes, when I’m thrown out in the the larger–much larger–”real” world, I realize just how strange my chosen lifestyle really is.

Last weekend, I attended a friend’s baby shower. Spending a few hours over over bottle warmers and boppies–I am still not sure what that is or what you do with it–isn’t exactly my thing, but it’s a small price to pay to support a good friend. So off I went to such an upscale neighborhood that I don’t think I could afford to breathe the air there. Luckily no one caught me. And after a very startling incident in which a St. Bernard (apparently mixed with a mastodon) pinned me against the wall in the hostess’s hallway and inspired a full on anxiety attack, complete with tears and uncontrollable shaking, I was feeling out of place.

But I wiped that running mascara off, sat my butt down and did my best to be an inconspicuous part of the goings on. I listened to the other women converse. They are doctors and therapists and scientists. They go home at night and nurse babies and play with toddlers. They go to wine country. They train for marathons. They go on vacations and cruises. They have shoes and bags and outfits and jewelry that all go together. They don’t collapse in heaps of terror in other people’s hallways when the hound of the Baskervilles shows up. I felt as though I were a lower form of life on their planet–a planet that orbits an entirely different sun. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a terrible week by anyone’s assessment. The people of Japan are suffering, and the governments of Bahrain and Libya are cracking down on (read: killing) protesters. On a far non-deadly–but by no means unworrying–scale, the US marches on toward complete decimation not only of workers’ rights, but also our cultural heritage itself. How do you even begin to address the issues in the world this week?

Today, I want to share with you this talk by Chris Abani. Mr. Abani is a writer published by (among others) Red Hen Press, which also publishes The Los Angeles Review. I had the honor of hearing Abani speak, in a different appearance than the one linked above, this past summer when I and a fellow LAR editor visited the press’s reading series. The experience of hearing him read his poems, which are hard-won indeed, made quite an impression on me. You see, Chris Abani’s struggles as a writer and as a human being go far beyond what most of us authors will ever endure with our petty dramas over rejection and inspiration. Abani was put on death row in Nigeria–twice–for his writings, where he suffered through unimaginable abuse and torture. The fact that he emerged from this kind of suffering with the kind of compassion and humanity you’ll hear in his talk? It’s enough to give me–and, I hope, you–a little hope on a dark day like this one.