Archive for the ‘ON WRITING’ Category
Art, Money, & Character: Literary Agent, Cullen Stanley, Challenges Martha McPhee About Dear Money
Cullen Stanley, Literary Agent: Janklow Nesbit CS: I’ve heard you describe India Palmer’s transformation from writer to trader as a Pygmalion story. Could you elaborate on that and why you selected this kind of transformation for your protagonist? MM: I was propositioned by a Wall Street trader and he said if you give me 18 [...]
Filed under: On Dear Money, ON WRITING | 4 Comments
Proofread Your Heart
Oh no, my daughter is a poet. Proofread Your Heart When hatred takes over your heart, whisper to me when your goddess fails whisper when the world is gone whisper because there is an answer when the sound of guns and bullets crashes down whisper to me for even up here I can hear. [...]
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A Crossing From them the dust and from them the storm, and the smoke in the sky, and a rumble in the ground; and from them the very sky seeming, from afar, parabolic; from the curve or girth beyond the eye’s reach; from/across/& through— a beautiful level and fertile plain— with soggy bottoms of [...]
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Mona Simpson, at Hofstra for The Great Writers Great Readers series, put it quite simply: “The older I get the more interested I become in plot.” Why? Because with time life’s plots reveal themselves unequivocally. One begins to understand that while there may be as many stories as there are people, there are a finite [...]
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Mona Simpson is coming to Hofstra University on Wednesday, March 10 at 7PM to read in the library’s Cultural Center Theater. You are welcome to join us. In 1988 my father introduced my sisters and me to Mona. We were all living in New York City then and so was [...]
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Rocco, Attention-Loving Hamster
Rocco I got five As in my school report card so My mom bought me a hamster. I called him Rocco Because that is what my mom Called me before I was born. Rocco was attention-loving like My great grand-mother grammy Who sadly I never knew. He did acrobatics on the bars of his cage [...]
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Where Do Titles Come From?
Bright Angel Time, my first novel had so many terrible working titles, but I wrote the book so long ago I can’t remember what they were. I do remember that my editor wanted to change the title from Bright Angel Time to Falling Backwards. I refused because a Michael Douglas film was recently out called [...]
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Stunning Student Prose
Irrigation Ditch by Laura McPhee from River of No Return I have many stunning students, but every once in a while I read something so terrific it makes me shiver. Adam Bedell’s writing glitters with passion. I love my job at Hofstra University. I adore my students. Working with this quality of prose, I believe there [...]
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Confession: I Can’t Spell
By the artist Janie Geiser, given to Mark and me as a wedding present I have never been able to spell. This is a humiliating fact for me. I write fast and with a studied sloppiness so that the reader will think I have bad penmanship rather than bad spelling. I can remember wincing many times, a [...]
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I adore elephants. This one reminds me of the sort of trip I’d like to be on. “All I want from fiction is a trip. And if I don’t get that trip, I don’t care whether it’s [from] a man or a woman, I have no time for it. I don’t want to read a [...]
Filed under: FOR STUDENTS, ON WRITING | 2 Comments
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