Wise words.
Taken from this awesome interview with Glass on Public Radio International about storytelling.
Archive | story telling RSS for this section
The Paris Review
One of the best things about time here in Paris has been finally having all the time I want to read and write. One of the places to find new and inspiring work would be The Paris Review, one of the best literary publications of all time. In addition to getting published there (a boy can dream, can’t he?), on my to-do list is to track down some of the old “offices” of the TPR during it’s stint in Paris at the magazine’s inceptionin the magazine’s early years. In addition to an office inside a publishing house, the magazine’s headquarters was at one point on a boat and another time at a cafe, Cafe Tournon.
How can you not be a fan of a magazine where one of the founding editors, Peter Matthiessen, worked for the CIA and started the literary journal as a cover? (Click here for interview where he discusses it at the 15:25 mark.)
One of the highlights is always the interviews done with famous writers, about themselves and their process. (According to Wikipedia, “Graham Greene’s interview almost ended before it began when one of the interviewers turned up hungover and threw up in his hat on Greene’s doorstep, and Nabokov’s was cut short when Jeopardy! came on.”) The Q&A’s are examples of the types of interviews that I find fascinating. They aren’t a vehicle for a writer to push their most recent product, but to try and find out about the writer’s process.
Here is the original introduction and explanation to the interviews.
Almost always 20 – 30 pages in length, the in-depth interviews are far from a cursory glance that only offer a topical glance into their process or psyche. They put some of the full length interviews online, which I downloaded, so I can read and refer to.
They also occasionally put scans of the writer’s own edits and revisions to their work.
If you were looking for something to read, may I suggest…
From NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute:
New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, together with a group of distinguished outside judges, will be selecting The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States. Ten years ago New York University, using some of the same judges, selected The Top 100 Works of Journalism of the Twentieth Century in the United States.
The eighty works of journalism listed here were nominated by the faculty at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute (with some student suggestions) and by our outside judges, who include: Madeleine Blais (University of Massachusetts), Dorothy Rabinowitz (Wall Street Journal), Morley Safer (60 Minutes), Gene Roberts (University of Maryland), Ben Yagoda (University of Delaware), Eric Newton (Knight Foundation), Ron Allen (NBC), Kathleen Parker (Washington Post), Leon Dash (University of Illinois), Juan Williams (NPR), Ezra Klein (blog, Washington Post), Alex Jones (Shorenstein Center, Harvard), Sylvia Nasar (Columbia), Daisy Hernández (Colorlines) and Greil Marcus (cultural critic).
The full-time faculty and our outside judges are now being asked to vote on these nominees — by March 22, 2010. The “Top Ten” — in order — will be announced on April 5, 2010, at New York University. Please feel free to comment on the nominees and make suggestions. Clicking on a nominee in the list that follows will bring up a short description and a link either to the work or to a discussion of the work.
– Mitchell Stephens, Professor of Journalism, NYU
There’s 80 pieces. Anyone want to split it with me?
We could do something like this guy, who is reading the Best American Short Stories series from 1978- 2009 and blogging about each story. Love it…
Ish you’re talking