THE STORY SPOT

Although there are many more “famous authors” in history (and today) than those in the series, these DVDs may be just the thing for a quick tour through the lives of your personal literary greats. Or perhaps you have teenagers who are suffering through a term paper and can’t stand the thought of reading any research info that doesn’t begin with the letters W-I-K-I. Check them out on Amazon.com.

Director Malcolm Hossick profiles such (dead, white, Western) literary greats as:

• John Steinbeck
• Virginia Woolf
• Edgar Allen Poe
• Jane Austen

Come back and let us know how they are.

(I address you thusly, ’cause we can assume you’re probably writers but the converse may not be true, no? Tsk, tsk.)

If you haven’t already done so, join me on over at Facebook and dip into some active and highly relevant group action. Check it out:

Wherever, Whenever

• Reading is Sexy
• Facebook’s Poets & Writers Registry

LA-local

• Because a Few People Still Read in LA
• The Rhapsodomancy Reading Series
• and…if you are an alum and haven’t joined yet, please do. Antioch University Los Angeles MFA

Toronto-local

• Storytelling Toronto
• The Imagining Toronto Book Club
• Coach House Books (support small presses!)

So I was at one of those pay-$15-bucks-to-hear-what-
you-already-know literary industry panels tonight. You know the kind where you’re surrounded by people who only leave the house to go to hear how they can find an agent who will adore their really great book–really, it’s great!–and find them a million-dollar advance? (Hey, I had nothin’ to do on a Monday night and I’m looking for an agen–never mind). And the inevitable questions were asked including: “Why has the world so completely switched from fiction-love to non-fiction-love?”

Answers were offered by very qualified people but still, I wanted to chime in here, if I may. It seems to me that the reasons for this can be somewhat easily observed: we, as a culture, have moved from the joys of being lost in the imaginative realm of fiction just as we have moved increasingly towards being a rational, logic and Spock-driven society, though we don’t know it. By that, I mean that we’ve steadily moved away from emotional experience–or at least the open acknowledgment and seeking of it. I don’t even know if we realize it as individuals. But, being human, we still need and crave emotional, imaginative experiences even when it is not fashionable to say so (even when we have lost our abilities to recognize what is missing). Listen, why else have we swarmed en masse to reality television and to books about harrowing emergence from impossible odds? It’s the visceral experience that draws us again and again. Yet we are not free, somehow, to enjoy the departure from rationality if it is not based in fact. Shame, that. The better questions are: what’s happening to reading, to our culture?

This too shall pass.

P&W’s Grants and Awards Calendar.
Always worth a gander.

http://pw.org/mag/0711/submissioncalendar.htm

Here’s a shameless plug for a friend’s book. I just finished it (though it’s been out for a little while) and I highly recommend you pick up a copy.

Tara Ison’s The List is firmly set in LA, offering tidbits of life in a city obsessed by stories told on celluloid. Tara’s writing is witty, fun, and capable of effortlessly transporting her readers (well, me anyway) into the very heart of her characters’ lives making me turn those pages to see how it ends. What’s better than that?

Okay, for fear of this sounding like some sort of review or blurb or something, I’ll leave you with a recommendation to read The List, especially if you live in LA and have struggled, at some point, with reconciling your love of art with what your momma always told you.

Check out The List via my aStore or at your local library and visit Tara’s site here.

Support local writers!