As Long as She Doesn’t Forget Where She Came From

And speaking of awesome Elissas being published around the web…

Our own Elissa Bassist has been having a rollicking good time over at TheRumpus.net, “an online magazine focused on culture with some politics.”

In her interview with Michael Showalter, the brilliant Bassist poses such questions as “How do you feel about grammar?” and “You co-wrote Wet Hot American Summer with David Wain. Is writing like sex in that it’s better with another person?”

And in A Baker’s Dozen of My Feelings About David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, our heroine overcomes her feeling that “I’m not a person who is a good enough person to write about David Foster Wallace.” And does a darn good job of doing just that.

Word Count

by juliacsmith

My mom finished writing a novel today.

She’s not alone; she’s one of thousands of winners of National Novel Writing Month. A winner is anyone who writes 50,000 words between November 1 and November 30.

Image courtesy NaNoWriMo

Fifty thousand words. In November. I don’t think I need to remind any of you that it’s been, um, an eventful month. And my mom is no less busy than any other Baby Boomer with an aging parent, no retirement in sight, a commitment to her community, oh, and a couple of twentysomething daughters who continue to use her home as a base.

In the middle of all that, she is a novelist and now the world has proof.

This wasn’t my mom’s first attempt at NaNoWriMo. A year or two ago she started a murder mystery about a stand-up comedian accused of killing a jerk who heckled her at open mic nights. To my knowledge, that one is still on the shelf. But you know what? After spending so much time with her heroine, my mom catapulted herself from the computer keyboard onto not one, not two, but THREE local stages for comedy open mic nights.

How to Write to Change the World

by joannameng

A few days ago, I participated in a one-day seminar called How to Write to Change the World put on by Catherine Orenstein of the Op-Ed Project. Orenstein is an experienced writer and op-ed contributor who wants to see more women participating in opinion journalism.

Orenstein told us that in the first few months of 2008, nine out of every ten op-ed pieces submitted to major national newspapers were written by men. Therefore, about the same amount (88 percent) of published op-eds were by men. To get our voices into public debate, women need to write and submit more op-eds!

The first exercise of the day involved recognizing ourselves as experts in some topic—any topic, no matter how small. There were 12 women in the room, and even though most of us were accomplished professors, lawyers, graduate students, nonprofit professionals, entrepreneurs, or activists, we had a lot of trouble asserting our expertise in any area.