You should read this.

Oooh, look, a new issue of Brevity, the online lit mag for short creative nonfiction.

"If you want to be a great writer, be a man."

I'm a sucker for op-eds that tackle gender issues and writing.

Like this one from Julianna Baggott in the Washington Post, in which she talks about the ways we idolize male writers (yes, even in today's equal-rights world) and leave the women in a pile of chick lit and romance novels.

To quote: "In my grad school thesis, written at 23, you'll find young men coming of age, old men haunted by war, Oedipus complexes galore. If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

No one told me this outright. But I was told to worship Chekhov, Cheever, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Carver, Marquez, O'Brien. . . . This was the dawn of political correctness. Women were listed as concessions. In the middle of my master's, a female writer took center stage with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award -- E. Annie Proulx. Ah, there was a catch. She was writing about men and therefore like a man."

Salon's Broadsheet column has more on this.

You could submit something:

To the Chicago Reader, for the annual fiction issue.
Details here.

You could write about this:

Details on Slate here.

Girls Gone Wilder

OK, there's a part of me that waxes nostalgic about reading Laura Ingalls Wilder because I share her last name. But the other part really loved reading those books when I was a kid. So it was with intrigue and fondness that I read this piece in Salon about Rose Wilder Lane and her life. The Wilder women also are the subjects of an Aug. 10 New Yorker piece.

From the Salon piece (quoting author Wendy McClure here): "For some reason Rose went out of her way to promote the idea of her mother as the sweet little lady pouring out her life in notebooks. She did it at her expense, and maybe ours, too, because I really wish that as a kid I'd gotten to hear more about Rose's writing life. For God's sake, the woman spent a whole winter in an unheated Greenwich Village flat typing and sleeping under newspapers, and somehow that's not as cool as twisting hay?"

Poetry from normal, banal life

Robert Pinsky writes about Alexander Pope and finding poetry in the mundane on Slate, here.

"All I have is intense curiosity."

I am eating up this Paris Review interview with Gay Talese. He works in a bunker (former wine cellar) in his house and writes longhand before typing on a typewriter before transferring his later draft to computer. He takes notes on cardboard shirtboards, like you might find at a drycleaners. Oh, and he's been hailed for writing one of the greatest magazine stories ever.

Mmm, delicious books

Newberry Library Book Fair this weekend. Any takers?

Are you a literary lightweight?

Take this quiz from the BBC magazine to test your literary knowledge. It's a random sample from the General Certificate of Secondary Education, which is taken by 15- and 16-year-olds in the UK. I did... much worse than I would have liked.

In which I suggest things you read online:

Useful:
Brevity's "Craft Essays"
in which we read short essays on the craft of nonfiction writing

Enlightening:
Papercuts Blog "Living with Music" Series
in which authors discuss their current playlists, often made of eclectic choices

Moving:
Pacing the Panic Room Blog
in which a dad-to-be (now a new dad) writes "candidly and vividly about the building of (his) family"