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August 22, 2011

UCLA WRITERS FAIRE

After a blissful two semester hiatus, I will return to teaching this fall at UCLA, repeating my Novel III class (now open for registration), and then teaching Novel IV in the winter.  In advance of those classes, I will be appearing on a pair of panels this Sunday at the Writers' Program's annual Writers Faire at UCLA, so you can come kick the tires before signing up for a class. 

At 1:30 I will be participating in Making it to "The End": Story Staying Power for Novelists and at 2:20 I will be part of the Getting Your Fiction Published panel.  Since I've already got a number of students who have successfully finished drafts, I'd say my thoughts on the former are worth hearing out.  I'm a bit less enthused about the second panel, in that my feeling - grotesquely oversimplified - is that if you are thinking about getting your work published, you're thinking about the wrong thing.  I tell my students time and again that the only thing any of them need to be thinking about is writing the best possible manuscript. Period.  I'll say as much on Sunday.

If you can't make it in person, UCLA does plan to stream things this year.  And I will be noodling around in the morning, taking in a few other panels, including my friend, author and fellow instructor Darcy Cosper who will be talking about Writing Your First Novel (11 am) and Writing With A Day Job (11:50 am).  There will also be great exhibitors including the Writers Junction and 826LA, so do come out for a fine literary Sunday at UCLA.  It's all free.  Hope to see you there.

Posted at 03:41 PM in Events |

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Comments

Shelley

I hope "teaching this fail" has no Freudian overtones!

As a writer, I know what you mean about focusing on the work; but I also know that some good work goes unpublished.

My semester is starting too. May we both have good students....

Posted by: Shelley | August 23, 2011 at 08:51 AM

Mark Sarvas

Yikes, fixed. Thanks, Shelley. Good luck with your class ...

Posted by: Mark Sarvas | August 23, 2011 at 02:46 PM

Literary Media Hub

Sounds excellent and looking forward to the streams as not possible to be there!

Good luck with your classes!

Posted by: Literary Media Hub | August 27, 2011 at 10:11 AM

sujana

different idea makes a man different.. as a writer u wrote different.. wish u good luck.. www.boiwala.com

Posted by: sujana | February 29, 2012 at 12:42 PM

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SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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