Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays with Story
November 11, 2015
Our scheduled newsletter editor, Judith, is busy with a computer crash. A good reminder to the rest of us to back-up our files to “Ye Olde Cloud” or a thumb drive. Or both, if you’re a little compulsive.
| “Being too busy to worry about backup is like being too busy driving a car to put on a seatbelt.” – T.E. Ronneberg |
Unique Fiction Style
Ellen Hopkins created her own genre with Crank, a novel-in-verse, and her latest, Traffick, promises the same gorgeous language and fearless take on a tough subject. Watch the video linked here.
Veteran’s Day
Today is Veteran’s Day, honoring all branches and service members current and past. The Los Angeles Review of Books has an interesting article on women serving and their reflective literature.
“Less than one percent of the US population has joined the military during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some 12 percent served during World War II, almost 10 percent in Vietnam. As those cohorts have decreased, the overall number of veterans has been shrinking. Women, however, are the fastest-growing segment of the veteran population. As restrictions limiting their roles have slowly been lifted, women have served at unprecedented rates in recent years, in positions from piloting aircraft to manning machine guns in combat.”
Read the full article at https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/women-writing-war-list-essential-contemporary-war-literature-women
The New Yorker also has an interesting article about current literature by veterans, too.
“Soldiers who set out to write the story of their war also have to navigate a minefield of clichés: all of them more or less true but open to qualification; many sowed long before the soldiers were ever deployed, because every war is like every other war. That’s one of them. War is hell is another. War begins in illusion and ends in blood and tears. Soldiers go to war for their country’s cause and wind up fighting for one another. Soldiers are dreamers (Sassoon said that). No one returns from war the same person who went. War opens an unbridgeable gap between soldiers and civilians. There’s no truth in war—just each soldier’s experience. “You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (from “How to Tell a True War Story,” in O’Brien’s story collection “The Things They Carried”).”
Read the full article at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/07/home-fires-2
Who’s up Next?
November 17: Pat Edwards (???), Cindi Dyke (chapter, North Road), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter 3-4, rewrite, novel), Bob Kralapp (short story, part 3, “Letters”), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 23-26, Killing Ham).
November 24: 2nd and 4th Meeting to be held at The Chocolaterian, 2004 Atwood Ave., 3 blocks west of the Barrymore Theater, 608-249-1156. Will also be there, Dec. 8 and Dec. 22nd.
December 1: Lisa McDougal (chapter 43, Tebow Family Secret), Cindi Dyke (chapter, North Road), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Judith McNeil (???), Millie Mader (poem), and Bob Kralapp (???). Location changed to Alicia Ashman Library on Old Sauk and High Point corner.
Worth your time to listen . . .
TTBook – To the Best of our Knowledge, a weekly series of broadcasts produced by Wisconsin Public Radio – this past weekend aired an hour-long show on what makes a good short story. If you missed the show, you can listen to it now on your computer. Here’s the link: http://www.ttbook.org/book/short-stories
Writers Mail editor . . .
Judith McNeil is our editor for November. The good stuff you’d like to share with our colleagues, please e-mail it to her.
Tuesdays with Story 
Leave a Reply