Friday wrap, with lettuce

Ouf how time is pressing against me, with lots of things clamouring for my attention. Once I worked in a place where a (wonderful) graphic designer used to call out to the room “priority conflict!” when deadlines were ticking closer and she had heaps to do and now it’s what I feel like shouting too, even though I don’t have deadlines, just stuff that’s on my list. I don’t think I’ve finished my Melbourne Writers Festival posts – no, there’s still Salman and Dave Eggers to come. Also I need to do a post on local writer Eli Glasman, who I stalked (just a little) by attending several of his book events around the traps. (He’s lovely, btw, and his first book The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew by Sleepers Publishing, is a book worth reading, regardless of your usual tastes. More on him and the book later.) THEN I have to catch up on my writing workshop with Toni Jordan from a few months ago, she’s like the Best Teacher Ever. And then I’ve got some book responses to post too.

But the most imminent thing I have is an upcoming interview with novelist Annabel Smith, whose latest book The Ark was launched this week (sadly in Perth, not here in Melbs). I haven’t read it yet—it’s winging its way to me—but I’ll do an interview with Annabel as a kind of pre-read exercise and then will do a book response once I’ve read it.

In the meantime if you want to read some Ark-related stuff, here’s a link to the launch

The Ark launch

And here is The Ark website, check it out especially if you like your fiction dystopian and dark.

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AS for Friday wrap, here is some of the stuff I’ve been perusing over the last few weeks:

1. Continuing my David Foster Wallace obsession, here is an astounding long story of his called GOOD OLD NEON.

2. Short story writer Ryan O’Neill on his process, at his blog The Short of It.

3. Article, review thingy on The Goldfinch (I’ve collected heaps of links about this book for some reason)

4. Back when Eimear McBride’s book A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing won the Bailey’s Prize (this shows how long it is since I’ve been collecting links for Friday Wrap, and not consistently posting in this series) this article was published in the Guardian.

5. An interview with Helen Garner

6. “What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65… and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?” Maria Popova from Brainpickings, and Anne Lamott on how to handle haters. (I saw Popova chatting with Jason Steger and Antoni Jach at the recent MWF. She wore bright yellow clogs and the best dress, the fabric was like a Liberty print—but not—of bookshelves. It was a session of intellectual jousting with Popova doing more than holding her own, while not giving away anything much of a personal nature. She seemed, to me, unapologetically cool and a complete braniac. Steger wore orange socks (from memory, I have it noted somewhere), and there was a frisson of something between the two of them; Antoni Jach (one of my writing teachers) was gorgeous as usual, gentlemanly and polite. Here’s the link.

7. A complainy piece about how writers don’t make money.

8. Another Eimear McBride article: There are serious readers who want to be challenged. FUCK YES. Article here.

9. Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage. – Anaïs Nin. Here is a collection of 10 great Life quotations from writers.

10. The University of Iowa International Writing Program is a FREE ONLINE course. Sign up here. I wish I had the time but I suspect I do not.