Web directories and resources for creative writing: Yahoo directory

I was excited recently to discover that Yahoo still maintains a Web subject directory (which, ironically, I found via a Google search); even more excited to see that one of its subject categories is Literature > Creative Writing.

[For those of you who don't know Yahoo's history, before Yahoo had devolved into a celebrity news port, its focus was on indexing the Internet—this was before the Internet got so crowded. I heard a Yahoo rep speak at librarian conference in the mid-90s about their subject indexing.]

But I'm not sure that I can trust this directory as being either comprehensive or unbiased. When I looked at the Yahoo sub-listing for Literature > Creative Writing/Blogs, I was puzzled that they list only 25 blogs, and wondered why they'd listed Neil Gaiman's blog first—which meant the list isn't alphabetical, but it didn't say if it was listed by popularity ranking either.

Of course I wanted to help them plump up the list, so I clicked on the top link that says "Suggest a Site"—this links to a page that says:

There are two ways you can submit a site to the Yahoo! Directory.

Standard
Free!
No time guarantee

or

Yahoo! Directory Submit
7- Day Guarantee (If you choose Yahoo! Directory Submit we guarantee that your site will be considered by our editors within 7 business days.)
US$299.00 non-refundable, recurring annual fee

So, writer beware. I'm sharing the link to this listing, but not necessarily endorsing it.

The dark bookends of my reporting career

When I started work at the Winston-Salem Journal in the summer of 1985, a dark cloud hung over me, especially as I walked to work from the public parking garage that first day of work. It was an unease that was with me until I was safely inside the building.

The previous year, on her way to work, newly hired copy editor Deborah Sykes was murdered just a few blocks from where I was walking. (Sykes had just been hired by the Journal's then-afternoon paper, The Sentinel).

Although the circumstances were slightly different—I was going into work at 9 a.m., a busier time than her early a.m. entrance—I felt her ghost with me every morning and every evening as I walked to my car, even after I got to park in the closer-by company parking lot.

A few weeks later, I moved up to Boone to work at the paper's Northwest Bureau. I relaxed there, unworried about keeping late hours since my office was on King St., the town's main drag. I could park my car right in front at night and walk to it straight from my building.

But just weeks after I left Boone for graduate school in Chapel Hill, a young female reporter at the local Watauga Democrat was found murdered near the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Her first name was Jenny. She was young, sweet, dark-haired, still fairly fresh from college. The newspaper accounts at the time said she'd been on her way to work early in the morning, probably accosted in downtown Boone and driven out to the Parkway where she was murdered.

"That could have been me"—a whispered epiphany. Since then, whenever I've left work in the dark, I've enlisted co-workers or building guards to walk out with me, especially when the streets are quiet and empty. I don't feel paranoid, but cautious—a caution composed equally of regret and sadness and fear.

Is it the price women pay when we walk alone? If not death, then the persistent threat of death, no matter how undeterred or indifferent we pretend to be. It is the price two newspaper women in one state paid in the space of two years. Since men outnumbered women at newspapers at the time, imagine the statistics.

Maybe the worst thing about these murders was that they were expected, in a horrible, subconscious way—they were out when no one else was out, they were women, they were alone. Yet in that time period, as far as I know, no male reporter in North Carolina (or anywhere in the United States, as far as I know) was murdered or assaulted.

I put on a brave face, walking out of the Winston-Salem Journal and into the dark. I was one of the guys when I was in there, typing away, drinking coffee, slinging words around. But out there, in the silence, I was different from them, vulnerable in a way they probably couldn't understand, a vulnerability I probably would have denied, even to myself.

Follow-up: The unbearable briefness of a dance career

When I wrote about dance as an ephemeral art recently, I talked about how a dancer's career is shorter than a writer's because the body ages out of it. But I failed to mention the possibility of injury cutting that career even shorter. The near-constant possibility of injury makes dance even more precious and fleeting—something that viewers of So You Think You Can Dance have recently witnessed. Alex Wong, my favorite dancer from the current season, was injured last week during a rehearsal for a Bollywood number. He leaped and then crashed down, his Achilles tendon ripped.

The next night, Alex stood on crutches while judge/producer Nigel Lythgow told the audience that Alex will have surgery this week, which is predicted to be "80 percent effective." Then Alex must recuperate for three months. That means three months without work for Alex, who left his post as the principal dancer with the Miami City Ballet to be on the TV show and, in so doing, was told by the company's director not to come back. There's a 20 percent chance he may not be able to dance again, anywhere.

The audience gasped at the news and Alex wept, tears streaming down his face.

Alex was in two of the best dances in the past few weeks: a modern dance routine to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah in the first competition broadcast; and a hip-hop number, amazing because he is a ballet dancer but still acquired hip-hop so quickly. (I can't embed the dances here because Dick Clark Productions is continually forcing them off of YouTube; I've done my best to find them on the SYTYCD web site, in the links above, but the clips I've found may not be exact. Each clip is probably also, unfortunately, preceded by a 25-second ad on their web site).

What if these are Alex's last two, best dance performances? Is it enough that they were seen be a national audience for those few precious minutes? Will they be the sum of his body's artistic work?

I remember what Joni Mitchell said in her "Miles of Aisles" live album: "No one ever said, 'Paint me another Starry, Starry Night, man'," referring to the impermanent art of the performer (perhaps one reason she retreated to painting).

If everything I wanted to say as a writer could be compressed into a three-minute dance, would I risk dancing it if it meant I couldn't express myself again? Of course not—my fingers ache nearly every day to say something, to put something down. But most professional dancers must face this question, however subconsciously, each time they perform; any dance could be their last.

Follow-up: The Last Page (one more thing I like about Smithsonian Magazine)

I failed to mention one of my favorite features in Smithsonian Magazine in my June 25th post: The Last Page, a one-page humorous essay that has appeared in the magazine for several years now. I often turn to it first when I pick up a new issue. Some of my favorite recent pieces include Green Eggs and Salmonella? ("Beware the hidden hazards lurking within popular children's books"); and Words to Remember ("Amanda McKittrick Ros predicted she would achieve lasting fame as a novelist").

I can't find a direct link to its archive on the magazine's web site, but you can hunt it down online two ways:

• Go to the full issue magazine Archive, click on each individual issue, and look for The Last Page as the last listed item, or
• Try your luck with an advanced search I devised on Google, searching for The-Last-Page as part of the URL (this may not bring up everything).

It's also worth noting that The Last Page is cited on many writers' web sites as an excellent potential market for humor writers and essayists—probably because, right now, it pays $1,000 for accepted pieces, according to the magazine's The Last Page Humor Column Writer's Guidelines.

The future of books

• NPR's "On the Media" devoted a full hour to the future of books and publishing in its July 2nd show, Book It. (This is an updated re-broadcast of a previous show.) The broadcast includes an interview with Neil Gaiman on what authors in the future will have to do to make money. According to this show, formats like the iPad or the iPhone will be how books will be delivered in the future. Drat!

• On the Media's information page for this show includes a link to a 2008 New York magazine article, The End, which is on the end and/or the transformation of the publishing business.

• Realizing this was becoming one of my Links posts, I googled "future of the book" and found:

• The Institute for the Future of the Book (IFB seeks to chronicle the shift from print to screen, and "impact its development in a positive direction.")
• The Future of the Book - A Wired magazine article (from 1996!)
  
• Since links have a tendency to die, you can see other articles and web sites for yourself via my Google search for "future of the book"
• Finally, ironically, my Google search brought up the page, The Googlization of Everything, a page created by writer Siva Vaidhyanathan, who is working in collaboration with IFB.
  

Dance, the ephemeral art

Athough I normally avoid reality shows (because I'm not interested in dieters, dysfunctional families, or desperate "celebrities"), E-girl and I have been making our way through taped episodes of the current season of "So You Think You Can Dance" (SYTYCD).

Why? Because E-girl loves to dance. Even in utero, I realize now, she was trying to tap. She says she wants to be a professional dancer when she's older, for a few years, before she becomes a botanist and mom. She realizes there's an end to it already.

Is there any art more ephemeral than dance? Not just the performance, over in a few minutes. But the dancer's body itself—fleetingly supple and strong, particularly for ballet (and, probably, for break-dancing and hip-hop). Picasso was still producing art into his nineties, John Updike was writing and lecturing in his seventies. Old dancers can be teachers or choreographers, but if they still dance it's probably in solitude, without the audience they once hungered for.

Ironically, dance—the art form of motion—is the most static of art forms. It stays in place and can't be easily transported or transformed into another, more mobile medium. A painting can decorate a t-shirt or become a poster; a song can be heard while jogging or driving; words can become text which can become books or magazines or newspapers. Dance doesn't become anything else—it just is.

So the young people on SYTYCD may already be at their peak as dancers, or nearing it, which makes the dancing more precious and beautiful. You wish they didn't have to be judged and voted upon and eliminated, but could just be celebrated for their skill and enthusiasm.

I don't like the results show, the evening after the individual performances, where the dancers are lined up and told which ones got the lowest number of phone-in votes from the public. The bottom three are each given a minute to dance for their survival. I watch this part of the show with a finger on fast forward because it's too painful to watch, yet I still can't not watch it either. It's like a little death each week. And then the next week, the competition begins again and the cut performer is forgotten. The dance goes on.

(The illustration is a sepia-tinted snapshot of the "Hallelujah" dance from the first competition evening of this season's SYTYSD.)

Magazines I actually read: Smithsonian Magazine

Those who are regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I've been referencing Smithsonian magazine in recent posts. The reason is simple—my in-laws give us a membership to the Smithsonian every year, and the magazine comes free with the membership. But only in recent months have I become a steady and appreciative reader.

Unlike the New Yorker, the Smithsonian arrives in my mailbox once a month—perhaps it's most important characteristic for this harried reader. But the magazine also features gorgeous photographs (which, yes, means less text to burn through in one sitting) and, even better, frequent articles on literature and/or authors.

One of its regular features, "My Kind of Town," invites prominent authors to write about their hometowns or adopted cities. (You can access the feature from this link, and search past articles both geographically and alphabetically, by author. From this site you can also upload your own "My Kind of Town" submission, both text and photos.)

Recent articles written by and about well-known writers have included:

• Going Home Again (March 2010) - Joyce Carol Oates writes about the upstate New York town that influences much of her work;

• Mark Twain in Love (May 2010) The woman who, for Twain, was like Dante's Beatrice;

• Harper Lee's Novel Achievement (June 2010) [This was referenced in my June 21st post]

You can search its online archive for articles on:

• Books
• American Writers
• Literature (a broader subject category than books or American writers )

A full electronic archive of the magazine is available, from 2007 to the present.

However, despite my promotion of the magazine's web site, for me it's still a publication that is best approached tactilely, letting the pages fall open to a beautiful photograph or an unexpected revelation.

Why it sucks to be a (visual) artist

"The Wilkersons’ costliest board was the 1972 painting Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, a dazzling patchwork of stippled, dotted and crosshatched shapes, bought in 2000 for some $220,000—more than twice the price it had been auctioned for only three years earlier. The painting was done by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, an original member of the Papunya cooperative and one of its most celebrated. Sadly, the artist himself had long been overlooked; in 1997, an Australian journalist found Warangkula, by then old and homeless, sleeping along with other Aboriginal people in a dry riverbed near Alice Springs. Though he reportedly received less than $150 for his best-known painting, the publicity surrounding the 1997 sale revived his career somewhat..."

From: Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2010.

To overkill a mockingbird: fiction creates a new geography

This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, which is getting a lot of press. Invariably, in the articles I've read so far, the authors lament the commercial enterprises in Monroeville, Ala., (Harper Lee's hometown) that have sprung up as a result of the book. These include: the Mockingbird Grill, Radley's Fountain Grille, the Mockingbird Museum, and all the Mockingbird trickets, t-shirts, hats and tote bags that are sold there at local gift shops.

I was going to join the tsk-tsking of this exploitation and then it struck me—it's actually kind of cool that what began as two-dimensional type (and fiction at that!) has now reshaped a physical environment. Admittedly, it's not what Lee might have wanted, but one still has to give a shout-out to the power of the word on the page. How many authors' works are celebrated this vividly and on such a constant basis? Those businesses sprung up because fans of the book continue to make pilgrimages there and obviously they want to buy a memento of their time there and relive moments from the book.

But my elation with fiction creating a new geography was only momentary. Lee still lives in Monroeville. When she steps out, she is confronted with what really is a bastardization of her ideas, a tacky echo of the decades-ago outrage and intent that went into her book. She is stuck in Mockingbird-ville, physically and intellectually. The success of Mockingbird also probably stymied her future writing, according to Harper Lee's Novel Achievement, an article in the June 2010 Smithsonian magazine.

Compare Monroeville to Asheville, NC (at least the Asheville I knew 28 years ago...)—the setting for Thomas Wolfe's early novels. The boarding house that Wolfe had grown up in and which he had featured in Look Homeward, Angel was still there. You could pay to walk through and see place settings, linens and furniture from his era (perhaps some actually original); there was a Thomas Wolfe playhouse nearby. That was it, as far as I remember. No gift shop selling plastic angels, no t-shirts with Wolfe's visage or quotations from his books. I sometimes drove over to the boarding house after-hours and sat on the porch, undisturbed. [I think the boarding house burned down a few years ago—I'm not sure if it was rebuilt...]

What's the difference? Look Homeward, Angel has never been as perpetually popular as To Kill a Mockingbird—as far as I know, it's not on any high school required reading lists as Mockingbird still is (perhaps it's never been a high school English assignment because of its length, or its lack of message). But the bigger difference, I think, is that Asheville had more going for it; it already had the Blue Ridge Parkway nearby and the Biltmore Estate, and lots of rich people retiring there. It didn't need Wolfe nearly as much as Monroeville obviously needed Lee.

I'm glad to see physical spaces that celebrate writers and writing, but it's probably better for the writers if the celebrations begin after they've left the town or the living—otherwise the celebration can become a trap.

* * * * * * * * * *

I was going to make a list of other destinations for literary pilgrimages, but of course someone else has already done it. I found a nice list, with additional recommendations from readers, on the Mental Floss blog: Book Your Trip Now: 12 Literary Pilgrimages.

The poetry of the dead zone

Many times in the past, I'm sure, I rolled my eyes if I saw an old person poring over the Obituaries section in the newspaper. I thought it was morbid, their trying to find a familiar face or life, perhaps also trying to see who among their elderly friends had made it through another week.

But more and more these days, my eyes are drawn to that section of the Washington Post. Maybe it's because I am getting older and I've begun to occasionally see the names of acquaintances and neighbors there. That's not the only reason, though. I've started to see beauty in the brief prose that sums up a life.

Read past the horrifyingly succinct labels in the sub-heads (e.g., "Teacher," "Jewelry Maker," "Guidance Counselor," "Church Member") and you can see a road map of a life in retrospect:

• The "Church Member" assisted amputees for the Red Cross during WWII. (How?)
• The "Jewelry Maker"'s first marriage ended in divorce. (Why?)
• The "Guidance Counselor" danced professionally when she was young; her husband died 13 years before she did. (Did she miss him? Did she miss dancing?)

Most obits in the Post are written in the same four or five-paragraph format: (First p.) the person's full name, age, cause of death, and current town; (Middle paragraphs) significant events and achievements—jobs, degrees, volunteer positions; (Final p.) survivors. Were they happy? Bitter? Anxious? Regretful? Loved? The obits never say. The story, the poetry even, is in the words not written, the broad and full life that cannot be described so formulaically.

More distinct are the "In Memoriam" boxes that people put in the paper, usually on the anniversary of their loved one's death or birthday. The most heart-wrenching "In Memoriam" ads are those to children. On the first anniversary of an 11-year-old's death, her family ran a photo of her with the dates of her life beneath, and then the text of something she must have written shortly before she died: "If I were President...I would stop war. I would also want to try to stop pollution. If I can stop it, I will."... Is there anything more tragic than what is contained in these four column inches?

I still remember an "In Memoriam" I read a couple of years ago; beneath the photo of an ordinary-looking middle-aged man who had died five years before were these words: "I would give one year of my life to spend another day with you." That's a story there that could be written a hundred different ways by a hundred different people. Even the person who placed that ad could describe her life/their life a hundred different ways—and the story would never be completely and fully told.