Noah Baumbach’s latest film, Frances Ha, takes us into the world of a young woman a few years out of college. The effect is startlingly accurate, at times painful, and generally brilliant. The subject is familiar territory for Baumbach, who has built a career exploring the existential angst of young, educated, well-meaning people who were [...]
Dear friend, You know my pain, and that’s why I write to you now. You too have sat before a blank screen for hours, and hours, staring at a blinking cursor, feeling devoid of thought, frustrated, even depressed. Like me, you have never found the term ‘writer’s block’ satisfying. Writer’s block sounds like an acute [...]
Sometimes justice is served swiftly, sometimes not at all. And sometimes it takes 14 years, but when it’s finally served, it’s delicious. In an earlier life (i.e., my mid-20s), I was an aspiring arts journalist. And I did pretty well at it, for a kid from the Midwest who moved to New York with nothing [...]
What’s the difference between good writing and everything else? At the risk of sounding pedantic, I’ll offer this: specificity. You have to know what you’re writing and why. This doesn’t mean you have to know the exact form your writing will take before you lay down the first sentence, but at the very least, you [...]
What is it about tragedy that inspires us to write? I was in Boston two Mondays ago for the Boston Marathon, a race I attend every year. I’ve run it six times since 2006, but I decided to take a break from marathons in 2013. For the first time ever, I went simply to watch. [...]
The Spring 2013 issue of Contrary features new prose by Jennifer Givhan—a prose poem and two stories. The rising Albuquerque writer is the author of the poetry collection Red Sun Mother and the novel manuscript In The Time of Jubilee. We also have new poems by Vincent Joseph Noto, Mark Goad, Megan Alpert, and Bill Yarrow. New fiction [...]
Since Roger Ebert died I’ve been watching the tribute writers struggle to express his contribution. At The Atlantic, Christopher Orr rightly describes Ebert as a movie enthusiast, but here’s the analysis that follows: “The movies he loved, he truly loved. And the movies he hated, he truly hated.” That’s so truly true Orr can reuse it for [...]
I won’t lie: I’ve spent most of the past decade resenting Roger Ebert. I’d never been a fan of his “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” approach to something as nuanced as film criticism, but having grown up with “Siskel and Ebert” during the 1980s, I at least respected him as a knowledgeable guy. Until the summer of 2003. [...]
Virtually every high school student in the United States has been proselytized with the idea that book burning is bad. It’s on the syllabus: Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, typically assigned during sophomore or junior year, depicts a dystopian future in which books are burned by firemen working for the State as a means to control thought [...]
Getting published has never been a bigger deal than it is now. I’m not talking about getting “published” online; I’m talking about an actual magazine or journal deeming your work worthy enough to spend time and money committing it to the printed page. This has never been easy, exactly, but now that print outlets are [...]
Karina Borowicz sends word that her first collection of poetry, The Bees Are Waiting, which already had been selected by Franz Wright for the Marick Press Poetry Prize, has just been named a Must-Read Book of 2013 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Karina’s debut publication, the Maintenance of Public Order, appeared in Contrary in [...]
Short answer: look for publishers, keep on looking, then look some more. Longer answer: Though I’m no expert on getting published, I hope recounting my recent experience might be helpful to aspiring writers. My debut novella, Wheatyard, was recently accepted for publication by Kuboa Press, and is scheduled for release on April 30, 2013. I started writing [...]
These 31 perks of being an English major are by turns self-congratulatory and just plain funny, but they strike me as being just a few among many. And given that a lot of English majors also take film classes now, I’d like to extend the list into the realm of cinema studies. So with that in mind, [...]
Fortunately, the conversation around the VIDA Count continues online and because it’s a conversation by and about writing and literature, it’s a lively and intelligent conversation being held by some of the great minds working in literature today. Yay Facebook! This is what awareness feels like. Unfortunately, awareness also brings some lint along with the [...]