Shortest Essay Ever?

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore is pleased to have published what he believes to be the shortest essay ever, in the new Mississippi Review.

If you have a few seconds free, Read it right here.   Thanks.

Brevity 31 is Up and Running!

Our Fall 2009 Issue is ready for your inspection, kind reader.

Brevity 31 offers work from Sherman Alexie, Lee Martin, Brenda Miller, Ron Arias, Amy Lee Scott, Rebecca Frost, Ann Claycomb, Jehanne Dubrow, Scott Moncrieff, and April Monroe. Some of these folks you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, others have graced our pages in the past, and at least one is publishing for her first time. That’s the sort of mix that makes us happy here in the Brevity corporate towers.

Also, strong new Craft Essays from Stephen Corey, Dinah Lenney, Jennifer Culkin, and Towles Kintz, and Book Reviews from J. Luise, Stephanie Susnjara, and Dinty W. Moore. And also, ten (count ‘em, ten) wonderful photographs from Tricia Louvar.

Dinty W. Moore’s Book Tour Disaster Story

Brevity contributor and nonfiction heavyweight Robin Hemley has been collecting book tour disaster stories on his blog these past few weeks, and this week he features Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore:

http://robinhemley.com

“I admit to a measure of dismay when the manager met me in a dirty, ill-fitting, pilled sweater at the front of an empty store and then walked me up a flight of steps to a narrow, dingy second floor. It wasn’t the small number of cheap folding chairs that caught me up short, or the rickety podium. It was the vast array of “gently used” pornographic books and magazines that lined the walls. Though the main floor of this once-thriving bookshop contained the finest contemporary and classic literature, it seems the second-story skin books were paying the electric bills.”

Conference! Conversation!

Just in case you faithful readers are also elitists (that is, you don’t also read New Pages and Narrative), here are some things to be aware of.

The 3rd Annual Conversation and Connections Conference will be held in Washington DC on April 11. In addition to the normal gamut of panels and break-out sessions on writing and publishing, participants get to do what’s called “Speed Dating with Editors.” You can get the full details here. Sounds like fun.¹

Also, there was an article recently in Poets & Writers by Michael McGregor that featured Brevity’s own DintyW. Moore and raised some questions about truth in nonfiction and a supposed invasion of journalists to the genre. So far, Dinty has remained silent, but Richard Gilbert discusses the article on his blog, Narrative.

Will we ever know Dinty’s side?

¹ They seem to have hidden a few typos on the webpage in an effort to help you know which side of the speed dating table you should sit on—if you don’t notice the typos, you should pay for registration; if you do, they should pay you.

- David Grover

Brevity Editor Dinty W. Moore Workshopping in Mexico, Summer 2009

Details below, from the folks at the University of New Orleans Low-Residency Program:

Announcing the second annual Writing Workshops in San Miguel

Join us this summer in lovely San Miguel de Allende for an unforgettable month of writing and community. We’re very excited about our newest program and plan to make this year even better than last! Faculty and Guests will include:

Joseph and Amanda Boyden, Andrei Codrescu, Alex Espinoza, Dinty W. Moore, Steven Church, Bill Lavender, Jim Grimsley, Hank Lazer, Michael Winter, and many more

San Miguel is located in the mountains north of Mexico City. The high elevation keeps the summer months cool. It is close enough to Mexico City for weekend visits, and even closer to such historic locations as Dolores Hidalgo, Querétero, and historic Guanajuato, famous for its mummies, silver mines, and as the birthplace of Diego Rivera.   The program will provide excursions to nearby historic sites, and participants are also welcome to travel on their own on weekends.

Application for The Writing Workshops in San Miguel de Allende is now open.  The priority deadline to sign up is January 15, 2009. Some new courses we are offering, or hope to offer, this summer include: A Literary Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop in Fiction, Playwriting, and Screenwriting; A Food & Literature Class, which will feature many exciting readings, and food related excursions;A Chicano Literature Course; A Documentary Production Course; TWO CREATIVE NON-FICTION workshops, with Dinty W. Moore and Steven Church

For more details see www.lowres.uno.edu

And for scholarship opportunities:   http://www.lowres.uno.edu/contest.cfm

Questions?  CONTACT :

Jennifer Stewart

Coordinator

Study Abroad Programs in Writing

Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing

University of New Orleans

New Orleans, LA 70148

jennifer.stewart@uno.edu

-- 

Memoir en Mexico

Fully one-third of our editorial staff are south of the border for a few weeks, investigating the state of memoir en Mexico.  No report yet, but for now, this:

A Writing Workshop, By Any Other Name

And speaking of The Kenyon Review, the KR Blog makes note of yet another “withering attack” on the concept of writing workshops. The attacks just seem to come without end, from people who very often have little idea what they are talking about. Hanif Kureishi is certainly one of them.

But this latest stupid attack did force to me to reflect some on my pedagogy, and it finally hit me, like a soft mallet to the head, that I don’t teach a writing workshop – I’m not sure many of us in the academic creative writing field actually do – I teach an editing workshop.

Here’s what I mean:

A good workshop assists a young writer in seeing how a reader might encounter and experience their manuscript (with the help of some artificial readers – the workshop members.) Then, with the help of a prodding and encouraging teacher, the student is helped to see how to take what she has learned and re-vision what she has already written.

She learns how to take a muddy scene and make it clear. How to take a soggy bit of language and make it crisp. How to take a limp narrative arc and find some spine. How to take an undifferentiated character and create, well, character.

She learns, too, how voice can be altered, and how small changes can make a difference in point-of-view. This is editing that is being taught, and more specifically, self-editing. A student who learns the rigors and wonders of self-editing, before launching her work into the world, has learned quite a bit, and has greatly increased her chances of finding a publisher/audience.

We should call it an editing workshop, then, or a revision workshop, since that’s what we are teaching and modeling. If it were truly a writing workshop, those of us who teach would be standing over our students’ shoulders as they attempted their first drafts, and goodness knows I don’t do that.

So let’s call them poetry editing workshops, or creative nonfiction editing workshops, and do away with the perennial and pointless question: “Can writing be taught?”

- Dinty

What Else Does Dinty Know?

Hi, Dinty W. Moore here, editor of Brevity, the little magazine that could.

It seems I am doing a lot of blog interviews lately (see the blog entry two below this one), and that either means,

(a) I’m promoting the heck out of my new book, or

(b) I’m not getting nearly enough writing done, or

(c) both.

You decide.

But thanks all the same to Collected Miscellany for featuring me this week.

Here’s an excerpt

Well, the truth of Nixon is pretty spectacular – going back to the Alger Hiss case, and to so many seminal Cold War events of my parent’s generation. And he was the foe of John Kennedy, who became so important after his death. And then Watergate. This man was connected so closely to so much amazing history.

Beyond that, he has an iconic persona as well, as the angry father shaking his finger at his enemies, as the sneaky bastard who (not directly, of course) shot the college kids at Kent State, robbed the Watergate apartment building, lied about bombs in Vietnam. He represents everything we used to distrust about people over 30, and everything we now distrust about our leaders in Washington.

What Dinty W. Moore Knows

Oronte Churm over at insidehighered.com has published a wide-ranging interview with Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore on subjects that include panic, desire, writing brief, John and Yoko, and the every-popular truth in memoir equation  An excerpt:

“Simply put, my belief is that a memoir writer, or creative nonfiction writer, has a pact with the reader that goes like this: ‘Memory is faulty, but I’ve done my damnedest. I’ve fact-checked where possible, wracked my brain where appropriate, sat outside my old house on Memory Avenue for a while and tried, tried, tried, to get it right, and this is what resulted. I’m not faking it, ginning it up for book sales, grinding an ax against my parents, or in any other conscious way deceiving the reader—or myself. I’ve worked hard to access my memory and get an honest version here. But yes, I admit some of it may be influenced by memory’s tricks.’  That’s all you can do, that’s all I expect of a writer.”

Is the Essay Dead?

I don’t really agree with a lot of what Christina Nehring has to say in her recent anti-essay rant, but I am intrigued by this:

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable.

Well, yes! I actually do agree here.

And the rant is worth a read, even if only to define where and when you think she is over-stating .

– Dinty

Can Writing Be Taught (To 19-Year-Olds)?

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore is at his most crotchety in his guest blog post, On Seeing Clearly, over at Insidehighered.com.  Really, how does he get off saying stuff like this?

The average twenty-year old, by no fault of his own, doesn’t want the hard truth. He still wants to be reassured. He wants to believe that the answer is simple: if we act well, things turn out well; if we act badly, we are punished. It is only when we get older—most of us, that is—that we’re able to understand with any depth just how arbitrary, unfair, mysterious, odd, and slanted is that thing we call reality.