I spend today working on two different conference abstracts which are supposed to be very short (300 words max!) and yet somehow convince their readers that I have all the brilliant thoughts and should be invited to speak them. Which means that I have spent a little bit of time today writing down my ideas and several hours condensing each clause ( Read more... )

A friend of mine posted this article on Facebook a couple weeks ago and it's taken me all this time to get around to reading past the introduction, but I finally did and it's brilliant and I want to teach it now.

Lev Grossman, "Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology"* (TIME ( Read more... )

Knowing that I often teach about gender and film, a friend of mine posted this video on my facebook wall. It's a really clear, well-done explanation and application of something I'd never heard of before but obviously should have - the Bechdel Test. It's well worth watching this video, but in brief, this is a test for movies that asks: does the ( Read more... )

"So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world--the language that fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into ( Read more... )

My parents and I rented an Indian movie, Lagaan, from the library and watched the first half last night. It's about downtrodden villagers in 1893 British-occupied India learning to play cricket ( Read more... )

You guys might remember that back in the fall I went to hear Susan Cooper speak in Boston. It was an amazing talk (see my full account of the evening). Well, I just thought to check and the talk is up online! Though such things are bound to be more magical in person, I'd strongly recommend that anyone who's interested in children's literature or ( Read more... )

Monday I had my interview with the former neighbor and her son. It was just as absurd and Dickensian as I could have wished. They were both extremely friendly, and told me the length of his hair before the cut, and how long it took him to grow it out, and the sorts of things people said to him while his hair was long, and the name of the stylist ( Read more... )

Got a phonecall.

It was a woman who lived next door when I was little. "I ran into your mother at the supermarket yesterday," she starts off, "and she told me you're a writer!" Oo! thinks me, what could this be? Not a lead, at last, on the job I've been waiting for months, so patiently, to fall into my lap?...Almost. The woman's twelve-year- ( Read more... )

The first story from my thesis that I sent to a magazine came back today. I expected a rejection - they say a story is never accepted the first time out ("What if he makes it?" "No one's ever made their first jump!") What I didn't expect was for them to keep it less than a week. All these magazines say not to expect an answer for two to three ( Read more... )