Writer as Public Intellectual
Writers and Languages
Learning Another Language Can Only Improve Your Game By Eric Olsen A few weeks ago the writers’ website Redroom.com invited readers to blog about learning another language, the assumption being, I suppose, that writers are multilingual, or should be. Certainly there are all sorts of reasons why a writer should know more than one language. [...]
Eric Olsen Interview
Anyone who’s read We Wanted to Be Writers, or visited this site with regularity, knows how much Eric likes to hold forth. Combine that with Diane Prokop’s unconventional questions, and the result’s bound to be entertaining. Highly!
William A. Souder Interview
By Eric Olsen 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 [...]
Yet More on Great American Novel
Are You Up to the Challenge? Ok, writers and readers, clearly the gauntlet has been proffered and it’s time to fight back with some words of our own. In his Weekly Standard article on The Great American Novel (GAN), Roger Kimball insists, “The novel plays a different and a diminished role in our cultural life as [...]
More on Great American Novel
Continuing the Conversation By Dick Cummins Prompted by Eric’s guest post on Portland Book Review’s Writers on Writing blog, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad Dick Cummins continues the Great American Novel debate. Here’s what you get for poking the word bears. When I used to hear the term “Great American Novel,” I just thought [...]
The Great American Novel
Rethinking the Great American Novel in a guest post for the Portland Book Review‘s Writers on Writing, Eric Olsen defines the illusive tome and riffs on why we need it now more than ever.
China, Censorship, and Rupert’s Invisible Hand
By Eric Olsen @2bwriters Poor Rupert. I just read with no small delight that über-agent Andrew Wylie has accused HarperCollins (a Rupert Murdoch possession) of acting in an “unusually shrill and punitive” way toward authors. Much to my added delight, he managed to connect HarperCollins’ “shrill and punitive” behavior with Rupert Murdoch and the current hacking [...]
The Conscience of the Writer
By Eric Olsen At the recent Iowa Writers’ Workshop 75th anniversary celebration, the concluding session was titled “The Writer as Public Figure.” I went with great expectations, silly me, looking forward to an interesting discussion on, I dunno, maybe the writer as “public intellectual?” You know, the writer as someone who writes for a general audience [...]
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