Real Writers Top Three

One

If you told me thirty years ago that Rick Rubin would one day be my spirit guide, well, I would have laughed pretty hard.

Yeah, the guy who has produced albums for Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Slayer, The Cult, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Joan Jett, Johnny Cash, Nine Inch Nails and many others.

But along comes Rubin with a book I highly recommend: The Creative Act: A Way of Being.

I first heard Rubin on the Ezra Klein podcast and knew I would need to track down the book. There are lots of books out there about getting your head in the right creative space to be productive. Who knows why one book connects with you, but the next one is meh.

For me, Rubin nails it in a very Eastern way. Very Zen. And very insightful.

You will feel inspired.

Me? Rubin helped me think more about taking risks.

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Two

Cbeck this article in the New York Times: A Writer’s Lament: The Better You Write, The More You Will Fail.

The article was written by Stephen Marche, who has a book coming out called On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer.

Here are a few lines from the article:

“Writers’ abilities and their careers simply do not correlate; they never have. A particularly vicious species of irony drove the working life of Herman Melville. His first book was “Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life” — pure crap and a significant best seller. His final book was “Billy Budd,” a masterpiece that he couldn’t even manage to self-publish. His fate was like the sick joke of some cruel god. The better he wrote, the more he failed.”

To repeat:

“Writers’ abilities and their careers simply do not correlate; they never have.”

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Three

I went to AWP in Seattle last month. It was my first AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) conference.

Here’s the bottom line: it’s a rich, stimulating conference. More than 9,000 attendees! By my count, there were more people listening to one basic workshop on what literary agents do (From Slush to Sale: Literary Agents Explain it All) than attend Colorado Gold. The crowd spilled over into the hallway.  (That’s my photo, above, from the back of the room.)

However, there were also tons of workshops on very niche issues. Try these:

Radical Empathy: Writing and Community Engagement as a Form of Resistance

Writing the Body as Landscape: How We See and Imagine Ourselves as Wilderness

Comics Are the Future: Transformative Storytelling through Sequential Art

The Small Press Author’s Guide to Cultivating Community and Publicity

That’s four out of hundreds of panels and readings. Many virtual sessions, too, that are free along with conference registration.

And then there’s the Bookfair, with hundreds of booths and tables representing literary journals, literary conferences, MFA programs, and much more. 

See you next year (I hope) in Kansas City.

Mark Stevens