Hi everyone.
First off, our wonderful volunteers Anne Putnam and Vanessa Armstrong are putting together another Zoom writing session tomorrow at 8 ET / 5 PT. More info below and you can register here.
I was planning to join but unfortunately I coincidentally agreed to be part of The Antibody’s Quarantine Reading Series *at the exact same time* along with Porochista Khakpour and Justin Taylor. So if you’d rather watch me and other folks read that night, here’s more info about that.
In terms of what’s going on with me, I’m back from vacation and a little too obsessed with Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode right now, which is a book about patterns in narrative that is a bit abstract and academic but it’s apparently what my brain desires at the moment. Alison talking about spirals makes me think of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, whose narrative structure is spiral-like.
There’s this amazing passage in the book where Alison talks about different writers describing the structures of their work and the one that stood out to me was Italo Calvino talking about his books as being constructed like a crystal with different facets. My model for Fairest is a prism, where the book serves to refract the reader’s experience so that they come out of the book more aware of different parts of themselves they have not been as attuned to before. I talk about that a lot in this Slate interview.
Hope y’all are also getting some good reading and writing done. I’m doing some reporting this week, which has honestly been oddly renewing after spending so long working on and then promoting my personal writing.
Talk soon,
Meredith
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While this summer won't have any formal Zoom workshops, some members of Fairest Writer have decided to organize a group writing session for folks who are looking for some community (and accountability) as we work on our writing over the next couple of months.
The second session will take place on Tuesday, July 28 at 5 PM Pacific / 8 PM Eastern, and you can sign up here.
The format will be simple: a brief kickoff and introductions for everyone followed by 30-40 minutes of focused writing. They'll close the hour-long session by coming back together and sharing how we did and what we worked on.
Questions? Feel free to email Anne (ahputnam@gmail.com), who is coordinating the Zoom administration.