Book Launch: All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps

A trumpet player from St. Louis meets a tall, shy bowler in the college cafe. A single dad rediscovers his passion for older women, or at least for one older woman in particular. High school sweethearts reunite after two separate marriages, divorce and death, six children, and a three-month courtship twenty-five years later.

These are just the juiciest love stories hanging from my family tree, and in All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps (Penguin, 2012), you’ll get a peak at a few other extraordinary love stories being lived today. All There Is comes out February 2 and will be the third publication of highlights produced by StoryCorps, an oral history organization. (more…)

Jennifer Egan: Failure, as inspiration

In the second installment on the ongoing series about creativity, CNN.com profiles Jennifer Egan, the  Pulitzer Prize winning author of “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” We love Jennifer Egan here at NYWC, not just because she is a brilliant writer (one of the best of our generation, we think), but because she is a wonderful person.  Jennifer is our Fort Greene neighbor, and she appeared at our 2007 Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival. She also contributed to the NYWC publication  “Making the Trees Shiver: An Anthology of the First Six Years of the Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival” which was released this past fall.  In the CNN.com post, Jennifer discusses her process of multiple revisions, and other exhausting aspects of being a writer. There’s a great bit about how she felt like a failure after her first piece was published in the New Yorker. Read the full post in CNN.com about Jennifer Egan here.

Happy Monday!

Nobel Prize for Reading

This prompt uses a poem entitled “The Nobel Prize,” by Chilean writer and mathematician Nicanor Parra (who Roberto Bolaño called “the greatest living poet in the Spanish language.”) ”The Nobel Prize” comes from a collection of Parra’s poetry called Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great (which my wife recently gave to me on the occasion of my birthday and which I highly recommend). I used the prompt for the first time a few weeks ago in a workshop for formerly incarcerated men and women. It was well-received. Here’s how it works: (more…)

Friday 5: Top 5 Edith Wharton Glow Extenders

This week marks the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth. If you don’t want to celebrate with haberdashery romps and Grace Church galas (how could you not, though!?!), here’s another way: honor the New York dame by checking out the fantastic Gotham City women writers who came after her. Here is a starting list of my favorite femmes to extend that Edith Wharton glow:

Top Five Edith Wharton Glow Extenders

1. Dorothy Parker
2. Zora Neale Hurston
3. Anita Loos
4. Fran Lebowitz
5. Candace Bushnell

Granted, this is a hodgepodge of a list – kind of like the New Money, Old Money mash-ups Wharton wrote about. Can you think of more local lady scribes you’d toss in the mix? Add them in the comments below and let us know what you think.

inter-book club

Nine women are sitting on floral couches and wooden chairs drinking tea and eating cookies. They are chatting about politics, love, family, trauma and hope. This could be any group of women anywhere, but this group is special because it consists of a diverse ethnic group of women, including several Muslim women who live in the community of Bay Ridge. Many of them are mothers who met on the school playground or at parent events.

Barbara Cassidy, a longtime NYWC workshop facilitator, writer, actress and theater producer started the Inter-Book club with the idea of providing space for women to come together and discuss ideas. Her writing workshop, Ridge Kids, was started at the branch of the Bay Ridge library several years ago. She says, “When I noticed the children who were coming and writing together consisted of both Muslim and non- Muslim members of the community, a light went on. I remember thinking; wouldn’t it be great if the adults in our community could come together?” (more…)