Saturday, September 12, 7 p.m. at the Babylon Salon in San Francisco, I will be reading from my essay “The Outlaw Bride,” which will appear in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 (due out in October). I’m thrilled about this on many fronts: giving a reading, getting published in a book that not just my […]
For a couple of years I have had an idea completely unrelated to my current field of endeavor. The idea — tentatively named Bristlecone, for the oldest surviving pine trees — is, quite simply, a preservation plan for literary journals. The problem, in a nutshell No matter how passionately committed the publishing agency for any […]
David Pogue, tech enthusiast for the New York Times, is shocked, shocked that Amazon yanked Orwell’s books from the Kindle. But as Tim Spalding pointed out over on Web4Lib, it’s naïve to focus on Amazon and the Kindle. “People need to get over the idea that ebooks are ‘just’ books,†Tim wrote. “Just because you […]
Harvey Milk’s Birthday, 1979 Originally uploaded by freerangelibrarian Last night the news that New Hampshire had passed a marriage-equality bill to legalize same-sex marriage in January didn’t even lead the stories. This turn of events — the sixth state to pass this historic civil-rights legislation — is now just part of the rolling stone of […]
Still on the road, but just got word that “The Outlaw Bride” (published a few months back in Ninth Letter) was selected for The Best American Nonrequired Reading — an annual anthology I have always found fresh and delicious. I didn’t even know the essay had been submitted! (Or perhaps I knew and had forgotten… […]
I was afraid to start reading The Whole Five Feet, because I was worried it would be the book that Christopher Beha admits he thought he would be writing — a gimmick book in which a cagey young New Yorker does “X” for a year in order to have done something clever enough to write […]
I’ve been crazy-busy at work, and in the limited amount of time that is not-work I’ve been working on a short story, which I just submitted (sans ending, which I still haven’t thunk up) to my writing workshop. I haven’t written fiction since a high school creative writing class in 1974. I was initially inspired […]
“Who does Robert Olen Butler think he is?” I was trying to explain to a young man why you always, always carry a writing notebook and a pen, so I showed him this genuine, overhead-in-the-hallways, can’t-make-this-stuff-up line I had jotted down minutes earlier, and no, I’m not telling you who said it — not here […]
Sugar lady, be my saviour, ‘Cause I’m tired, I’ve been eight days on the road. That’s right, eight days on the road, Travelin’ through the night, There ain’t no town, ain’t no town, ain’t no rest tonight. I am zooming through this post since the work-bell clangs in 24 minutes, but here’s my latest adventures: […]
Today I am taking a writing day, as a way to help my writing soul and displace me from the omnipresent Now. I have too many writing tasks to work on in the next fourteen hours, and that’s a wonderful problem to contemplate! But I had this link roundup written, so here you go. As […]