Tag: The Writing Life
-
George Plimpton, Graywolf Press and the State of Literature Today
Today’s podcast of The Writing Bull offers you a two-fer: Years ago I had the opportunity to interview one of the founders and the editor of The Paris Review, George Plimpton. You might recognize him, his face popped up all over the place in the second half of the twentieth century, playing in a professional baseball game…
-
Art and Madness
There are studies on the connection between the artistic impulse and mental illness. The best are books written by Kay Redfield Jamison, especially her “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.” In that book, she charts hundreds of writers, from George Gordon Lord Byron to Virginia Woolf, and reveals how the mental illness…
-
Rejection Letters
This is one of the most painful aspects of a writer’s life. If you can work through this one, you’ve crossed a great desert of pain. And, with enough visceral fortitude, you’ll cross it, again, and again, and again. . . When it comes to rejection letters, I always think about one of my favorite…
-
Are You a Writer? Make Sourdough Bread!
Here’s a little entertainment for your Thursday evening, as you head into the weekend. One great habit to pick up if you’re a writer is to make sourdough bread. Because baking sourdough takes a long time. You have to stay in the house to keep an eye on it. There are long, long periods of it rising,…
-
T.C. Boyle and I Talk About Sex and More Sex and More Sex…
T. C. Boyle is one of our own southern California writers, and is an international figure. You can’t pin him down, can’t pigeonhole him. One novel is about the love between migrant farm workers and gringos who live in gated communities (Tortilla Curtain), another is about an eco-warrior whose daughter lives in a tree (A Friend…