March 2012
You are browsing the archive for March 2012.
Books by Valerie Brooks’ Bed
Valerie Brooks is a novelist, arts activist, Francophile and autodidact. During her 20s, she explored life as a visual artist, in her 30s she survived as an arts and education marketing specialist, and by age 40, she found her passion in fiction. The genre has led her to fellowships, an associate editorship at Northwest Review, [...]
Jane Smiley on Teaching Writing
Jane’s comments are excerpted from the transcript of our panel at the AWP conference in Chicago earlier this month, “Can the Creative Process Be Taught? Or Will Chicken Soup Do?” My life as a writing teacher has had three phases. The first one was when I was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I [...]
Books by Ellison G. Weist’s Bed
Ellison G. Weist hails from a long line of bibliomaniacs. Her personal battle with the illness has led to her being labeled “The Book Bully” due to a tendency to approach total strangers in bookstores with the hopes of, yes, infecting them. After a sales career with a “major soft drink company,” Ellison spent three years [...]
A New Approach to Book Promo
Blogging for Characters By Laird Harrison As promised in yesterday’s post, this is an example of using the capabilities of the internet to not only keep your first book alive, but to connect with readers of your next even as you write it. Laird Harrison is a novelist and multimedia journalist who has written for [...]
How to Nurture Your Book
Some Thoughts on Fish, and Keeping a Debut Book Alive By Eric Olsen A couple weeks ago, I was flying back to the Bay Area from Chicago after the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), where I moderated a panel discussion on whether or not the creative process can be [...]
Art of Monologue
“All You Need Is a Player, a Plank, and a Passion” — Jody Hovland, Artistic Director, Riverside Theatre The annual “Walking the Wire” festival at Iowa City’s Riverside Theatre features original work from playwrights across North America. Our own Gordon Mennenga contributed to this year’s theme, “This Will Never Work,” with his monologue “Shakytown,” about a [...]
Our First “Best Of” List!
Who knew, back in September, on the third stop of our Super Colossal Stupendous Superlative We Wanted to Be Writers Blog Tour, that Eric‘s “Five Books” interview with the erudite Sophie Roell would lead to inclusion in Best of FiveBooks 2011, The Browser‘s first e-book?! But wait! It gets better! We were chosen from more than 600 interviews. AND [...]
Food for (Creative) Thought
On March 2, Eric moderated a panel discussion at the annual meeting of AWP—this year in Chicago—titled: “The Creative Process: Can it Be Taught? Or Will Chicken Soup Do?” Panelists included Sherry Kramer, Gordon Mennenga, Jane Smiley, and Doug Unger. We were all classmates at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop 30-plus years ago, and the panelists are [...]
Books by William Souder’s Bed
Journalist and author William Souder lives and writes in Grant, Minnesota, which is far enough into the country that he gets to watch his neighbor cutting hay three or four times a summer, and where he can see five barns from his office window but still make out the Minneapolis skyline looking like Oz in [...]
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