What I’ve Been Up To LatelyNo comments yet

May 11th, 2012

–I’m now writing for Buzzfeed weekly, and super-excited to be so doing. My beat will be books and tech, so I’ll be writing about tech books (like Andrew Keen’s forthcoming Digital Vertigo), and books with a significant tech presence (like Gary Shtyengart’s Super Sad True Love Story, the theme of my first post, here).

–CBC’s Day 6 interviewed me about spelling. Listen to it, and read the comments (can you guess whether they are positive or negative?) here

–My second “How To Pitch” course is underway, and this group is phenomenal. People are posting pitches daily, and receiving many comments from other participants. We’ve had one sale, some internal challenges, and lots of chat about how freelancing really works.

–Otherwise, I have been moving sweet woodruff from one place to another in my garden, my copy of Bring Up The Bodies arrived, and I got crazy points for spelling “qwerty” on Spell Tower.

Words With Friends: The Problem of Social Reading4 comments

May 1st, 2012

We have accepted social media. We have accepted ebooks. Can we now accept their marriage–can we learn to love social reading?
“Social reading” is what happens when you connect with others through an ebook or mobile app. You can tweet your annotations as you read James Gleick’s The Information on your nook. On your Kobo, you can read comments left by other readers about that sentence on page 57. On your iPad, you can download Subtext and watch a video by the author, no longer a shadowy absent-presence behind the words.
But wait– isn’t reading defined by its very privacy?  Is it not to escape the social that we delve into books? Remember when everyone touted “curling up in bed to read a book” as the main reason ebooks would never fly? It seems unseemly to fill our beds with so many people.
Maybe. But reading is not, actually, a de facto solitary activity. We just made it seem that way in the twentieth century. Before then–well, Homeric bards spoke to crowds; St. Ambrose shocked other monks when he read words silently rather than out loud to himself, as had always been done; Dickens was read in reading circles, the orator near the candle, the rest listening. So it is no abomination: let’s be like Greeks and chat with each other while we read.
However, the field of social reading is crowded and proprietary–your nook and my Kindle can’t talk to each other. Most “social” features  have been created top-down, by companies, not devised  by readers themselves in an end-user innovation sparked by desire to connect. Nor is it clear what, exactly, people want to be social about: their favorite lines? videos of the author explaining to us her conceit? links to the wikipedia page explaining a reference? Authors are still writing self-contained works they imagine to be bounded between boards–or at least contained within one file–so the social aspect often comes in post hoc, awkwardly.
We readers know how to read socially–on the web. For social reading of books to be meaningful, the definition of “book” might need to change.
Here’s one definition of “book” I’ve been playing with: prose without links. Think about it–might we imagine two reigning models of reading–linked (or extractive, horizontal) and unlinked (or immersive, vertical)? A problem I see with “social reading” of books is that it asks us to link what we perceive as unlinked. As it were.
Also, “social reading,” as it is currently defined, shortchanges the ways in which “traditional” reading, including 20th century private practices, is already social: it forms the body of references, the cultural touchstones, with which we navigate our frames of references, our ways of being with others–”the social.”  The history of the book is filled with examples of readers talking to each other: an author comment on a kindle is simply a newfangled quotation mark.
 I’m a champion of digital forms of reading and writing, but I wonder if   “social reading” is both a  forced term and something we have been doing all along.

DIY Teaching And The Problem With InstitutionsNo comments yet

April 26th, 2012

In March, I started what might be called artisanal teaching.   I developed an ad hoc course for freelancers after thinking about how opaque that world can be, and with a desire to create greater transparency. I’ve taught my entire adult life, but this year is my first without a syllabus to write. I was feeling the itch I guess.

I really enjoyed working with the folks who signed up, and the course filled up quickly. So I set up another one for May. It is filled up quickly. The enrollees are predominantly female, but otherwise they span a range from Very Accomplished National Magazine Freelancers to college students interested in learning more.

Now I’ve just announced a June “section” of “How To Pitch.” I’m still doing this ad hoc–I announce new courses when the previous one fills up, and I’m not sure how long I’ll keep doing this.

Sometimes I consider offering other types of courses–a workshop to critique pitches? A course just on writing personal essays? I’ve done two face-to-face workshops in Cleveland, and may continue those as well.

But it’s funny, this leaving teaching only to devise my own personal educational system, as it were. And it’s interesting, this word-of-mouth thing. My advertising budget is nil. I use twitter and Facebook to let people know about the courses. That’s it.

When I’ve talked with friends about these courses, and the irony of my taking a leave from teaching only to start teaching again, they all immediately begin discussing  institutions and their discontents. The bureaucracy, the overhead, the wasted time.

So here’s my thesis, my point-last point: Behind the “crowd sourcing, start-up, kickstarter” culture we are developing may lie a troubled distrust of conventional institutions. It’s a rather Republican sentiment, in a way. I’m not entirely comfortable with this conceptually or theoretically. However, I’m extremely comfortable with the DIY teaching I’ve been doing.

 

How To Pitch: The Online Course, June 8-22*8 comments

April 25th, 2012

I do love helping others with their writing. That explains those 15 years teaching writing at Oberlin College, I suppose. I’ve been posting a lot about the VIDA stats and  my post on how to pitch VIDA publications has been extremely popular.  Now I’m offering an online course to help writers pitch publications.

So here’s the deal:

I am offering a two week course. It will run via an online blog.   I’ll post daily on freelancing basics, such as developing pitches, researching publications, coming up with story ideas, writing and submitting personal essays, and making you case (bio, clips,, etc.). I’ll also share some of the queries I’ve sold,  the emails I have had back and forth with (names redacted) editors,  the process I went through submitting personal essays, payment information, contracts, etc.

Since I started offering these courses I’ve developed a database of what I’m calling “intellectual journalism” publications that I’ll share with you. It contains editor, pay and contact information for 40 publications, and some say it alone is worth the cost of admissions.

In addition, I will  answer any and all questions you have about selling freelancing articles, book reviews and personal essays (the areas I have experience with). We’ll have a community of people sharing insights and asking questions. You’ll post your question to the group, I’ll respond, and others can chime in with their responses, further questions, experiences, etc.

If you’re interested in feedback on specific pitches, essays and/or review ideas you have sitting around or plan to write, I can do that, too. I’ll provide you with one-on-one feedback on pitches or an essay as often as you like during this two week period (I promise a two-day turnaround).

The fee is a freelance-friendly $100. If you want the  one-to-one feedback as well, the fee is $250. The class is limited to 15 participants total, and I have 5 slots for the one-on-one option.

There is no time commitment–think of it as information you will be receiving for the cost of admission. We won’t “meet” at any specific time, I won’t give you homework, and if you want to just lurk and not ask questions, that’s fine, too. The materials I post stay online for one month after the course ends. 

If all goes well, we’ll form a community, get to know each other and take our writing and freelancing one step further.

The course will work for brand new newbie rookie never before freelanced types of people and experienced freelancers who want to get to know other writers, have a community to offset their solitary work, hear about new markets, have an incentive to pitch ideas languishing in draft folders .

To sign up for the June 8-22 course,  just send a payment using PayPal to my email address. I’ll send you a confirming email back letting you know I received it and add you to the list using the email you use. If you want to pay by check, send me an email first, letting me know which option you are choosing, and I’ll reply with my address, etc.

See the comments below for some nice words by former participants.

Anything else you want to know? Shoot me an email at anne.trubek[at]gmail.com

*if you’ve enrolled in the May 4-18 course you should have  received an invitation to the course blog. If not,  let me know! Also, check your bulk mail–some invites are landing there.


 

Awesome, Ruined LettersNo comments yet

April 15th, 2012

I just spent a week in Greece, which involved lots of souvlaki and the loss and gain of awe. The temples just sit there on the hill, utterly public, defying defiling, brighter and bigger than you imagined. The Acropolis is lit at night but in the day the stones, the ones that fell off or were kicked over by the Christians, the Ottomen, the Lords of England, just lie about, so heavy they taunt us, as if the Gods had placed them there to remind us of our weakness, and poppies bloom in the cracks, so now we know why they call them poppies. These are the most ruinous of ruins.

I always love preserved decay (cue rust belt jokes here), but these offered something new to me: letters. Ruined letters, letters on ruins. I was transfixed. To whit:
I want to describe for you the emotional response I had to seeing so much writing carved on rocks. I saw writing on walls, written by slaves who helped build the oracle’s temple at Delphi upon their freedom,  and on chips of massive, fallen columns.
But I can’t, yet, describe, other than through cliche–the mark of the hand, the presence of the past, the embodiment of history. I’ll work on it.
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading up on epigraphy, the study of inscriptions, particularly ancient ones. While I was in Greece I read Don DeLillo’s The Names, which may have literature’s only epigrapher as a character (have I missed another?).
Where are the carved words today? We lament the passing of handwriting, but I’m wondering about an earlier writing technology. The first example that comes to my mind is this:
See what I mean? Emotional.
(update: thinking about this some more, and chatting about whether there were any poems about stone carvings with some folks on twitter, I started googling, and found this amazing story and transfixing clip about  Simon Armitage, who is carving poems on stones in Yorkshire: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-14224391)
(and my fellow writing history traveler, Matthew Battles, alerted me to a Robinson Jeffers poem, “To The Stone Carvers“: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182236)