Must-reads and where to be read on this week’s literary web
Three very different reads that stopped me in my tracks this week, plus a list of where writers can submit their work in August and September. Scroll on for literary links.
Three must-reads
The latest Lenny Letter features a piece by Morgan Jerkins entitled, “How I Overcame My Anger as a Black Writer Online.” Jerkins is a writer to watch — she publishes widely and her debut essay collection “This Will Be My Undoing” is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in 2018 — and it’s easy to see why. Descriptors like “brave,” “raw” and “honest” get thrown around with abandon when describing writers’ work, but rarely are they so deserved.
“From my own quaint bedroom, I could make my voice heard to hundreds of people,” writes Jerkins. “And when a verified Twitter user retweeted me, my words reached thousands. I could receive dozens of new followers in under two hours. I was formidable. My words were my own form of resistance, and I realized that my anger could be a form of currency: more bylines, money, contacts, influence. All of this was mine.”
In another corner of the web, the New Yorker published a story by Nick Romeo about SciFutures, a company that pays science fiction authors to write custom stories imagining the future for clients including Pepsi, Visa and NATO.
In one example of what SciFutures produces, written for a candy manufacturer, an illustrated story “imagines consumers touring a chocolate factory and donning virtual-reality headsets so that they can experience firsthand the sustainable growing practices of the cacao farmers and the humane treatment of workers along the company’s supply chain.”
It’s “Brave New World” meets “Portlandia.” And it only gets better.
“The moral of the story seemed to be that, despite technological changes that could harm a candymaker … the company would remain relevant far into the future. Very little about the characters, from their fawning interest in product narratives to their total devotion to the company’s particular formula, was plausible.” Uhhh. Creepy, no?
Fun fact: The founder of SciFutures, Ari Popper, came up with the concept after enrolling in a writing class at UCLA.
Also at the New Yorker, Patti Smith remembers Sam Shepard, her onetime romantic partner and longtime friend, who died Sunday. I suggest keeping tissues on hand for this song of a piece, pure elegy.
"Going over a passage describing the Western landscape, he suddenly looked up and said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t take you there.’ I just smiled, for somehow he had already done just that. Without a word, eyes closed, we tramped through the American desert.... Blue sand, I said, filled with wonder. Blue everything, he said, and the songs we sang had a color of their own."
A resource for writers
Literary website Entropy posted its latest roundup of “Where to Submit: August and September 2017,” a priceless resource for writers of all kinds submitting their work to literary magazines.
There are sections for book-length manuscript and chapbook submissions, as well as lists of journals focused on poetry or prose, but my favorite section is “Residencies, Fellowships, Conferences, & Opportunities.”
With links to applications for writer’s residencies in Nebraska, Oregon, Scotland, Iceland and more, it’s great escapism if you work in a cube farm — so much fodder with which to fantasize about typing away for long, blissfully uninterrupted weeks with the backdrop of some remote, pastoral vista — whether or not you intend to actually apply. (But why wouldn’t you?)
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