I would like to believe I could write about the Pacific Northwest, which is where I grew up and where I find many writers who really interest me because they are writing about the place where I grew up, without really referring to anything specific about the place. I would like to think that a place could be abstracted into a kind of inflection in the way, maybe, that someone would write a Southern Novel set in Scotland or a Russian novel set in Florida. I guess I mean by this a place is less a geography and more of a collection of generations gossiping about each other. This communal talk makes for a place because it is reflected in language.

Part of the reason “ a sense of place” bothers me is that it gives too much weight to the idea that fiction must be rooted in “life experience,” and real, significant events…

~ Matt Briggs @ SmokeLong Quarterly

Sometimes I wish Magnus Mills wasn’t around so I could write all his novels myself. But then I think I probably wouldn’t, so it’s a good thing he already has.

I believe in dedicated work rather than in ‘inspiration’; of course on some days, one writes better than on others. I believe writing to be a craft like carpentry, plumbing, or baking; one does the best one can. Much mischief has been caused by a loose word like ‘culture,’ which separates the crafts into the higher arts like music, writing, sculpture, and the lowlier workaday arts (those, and the many others like them, that I have mentioned above). In ‘culture circles,’ there is a tendency to look upon artists as the new priesthood of some esoteric religion. Nonsense—and dangerous nonsense moreover—we are all hewers of wood and drawers of water; only let us do it as thoroughly and joyously as we can.

~ George Mackay Brown

Scribal training was arduous, all the more so as students were made to learn both Akkadian and the even more obscure Sumerian, originally spoken by the inventors of cuneiform. As one student lamented, in Sumerian, in a Babylonian school text:

The door monitor said, “Why did you go out without my say-so?” and he beat me.
The water monitor said, “Why did you help yourself to water without my say-so?” and he beat me.
The Sumerian monitor said, “You spoke in Akkadian!” and he beat me.
My teacher said, “Your handwriting is not at all good!” and he beat me.

In between beatings, the teachers tried to instill a love of learning in their unhappy pupils. This was a struggle throughout the ancient Near East. “Your heart is denser than an obelisk,” one Egyptian instructor complained to his pupil. “Though I beat you with every kind of stick, you do not listen… Though I spend the day telling you ‘Write,’ it seems like a plague to you. Writing” — the teacher sternly concluded — “is very pleasant!”

~ David Damrosch, The Buried Book (167-168)

I can’t tell if I’ve written myself into a style or into a rut. Or maybe repeating myself is my style?

The community of mushroom aficionados and curious sideliners is eager to experience fungi in ways other than through the myopic extremes of scientific minutia or kitschy recipes and goofy crafts. Decomposition will present material relevant to the spirit of mushrooms, examining elements of what it means to be human through fungi related poetry.

@ New Pages

An intriguing idea, recalling Donald Evans’ wonderful mushroom portrait stamps, like a yearbook showing only the shyest of students:

The Digital Livings project is finding out how writers are carving out professional careers in new media, starting with a survey of UK writers and expanding worldwide later in the year.

Which skills do new media writers possess? Where do they sell their work? What advice do they have to offer those wishing to follow in their footsteps?

(via if:book)

The person who has become known as the Gawain poet remains as shadowy as the pages themselves. Among many other reasons, it is partly this anonymity that has made the poem so attractive to latter-day translators. The lack of authorship seems to serve as an invitation, opening up a space within the poem for a new writer to occupy. Its comparatively recent rediscovery acts as a further draw; if Milton or Pope had put their stamp on it, or if Dr. Johnson had offered an opinion, or if Keats or Coleridge or Wordsworth had drawn it into their orbit, such an invitation might now appear less forthcoming.

~ Simon Armitage, introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Kharms’s stories are truly odd, as in: at first you think they’re defective. They seem to cower at the suggestion of rising action, to blush at the heightened causality that makes a story a story. They sometimes end, you feel, before they’ve even begun. Here, in Yankelevich’s translation, is the entire text of “The Meeting”:

“Now, one day a man went to work and on the way he met another man, who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from.

“And that’s it, more or less.”

Bring that into workshop! You’ll get slaughtered. Crickets will sound in the seminar room. Someone will say, “I guess I’d like to know more about the Polish bread.”

~ George Saunders (via Matt Bell)

Twittories are stories composed 140 characters at a time by a diverse group of collaborators using Twitter to submit their entry.