10 Days of NYWC: 10 Fun Facts to help you Write Aloud

Today’s Shoptalk comes from Joelle Blackstock, a NYC Civic Corps volunteer currently serving the NY Writer’s Coalition. 

Get ready… Drumroll please… 10 Days of NYWC, the tenth anniversary celebration of NYWC featuring free readings, writing workshops, online publications, and community events, is kicking off on October 22 with an opening reception followed by the Writing Aloud Reading Series at the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art (MoCADA). I thought, what better way to get the momentum going than to bring you ten interesting facts on writers, writing, and reading.

Did you know that…

1. Charles Dickens had to be facing north before he could write so he would be lined up with the poles. He usually wrote a minimum of 2,000 words a day (some days he managed 4,000) with a goose quill pen and blue ink on blue-gray slips of paper
2. There are 72,466,926 books in the Library of Congress on 327 miles of bookshelves.
3. Seeing a pencil in your dream indicates that you are making a temporary impact on a situation. It may also suggest that the end of a relationship is near.
4. The name for having a fear of long words is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. Ironic, right?
5. One out of every eight letters you read is the letter ‘e’.
6. If you stretched out all the shelves in the New York Public Library, they would extend eighty miles. The books most often requested at this library are about drugs, witchcraft, astrology and Shakespeare.
7. In America, we buy 57 books per second which comes to approximately five million books a day. It would take a shelf 78 miles long to hold all of one day’s books purchased.
8. It took Noah Webster 36 years to write his first dictionary.
9. A. Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, was a professional ophthalmologist (an eye doctor). In his time, specialty medical practices were hard to build and didn’t pay well so he had to take up writing for financial support.
10. Jonathan Swift wrote a book called Gulliver’s Travels that borders on science fiction. It was written before science fiction was a book genre. In this book he wrote about two moons circling Mars and also described their size and speed of orbit. He did this one hundred years before they were described by astronomers.

So we bring you the Writing Aloud Reading Series which will feature writers from the NYWC community alongside established and emerging writers. This is a two part series this month. The first will be held on Monday, October 22 at 6:30 pm at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts located on 80 Hanson Place in Brooklyn. Join us for performances by NYWC workshop leaders Barbara Cassidy, Patrick Mathieu, Kimberly Shelby-Szyszko, Cait Weiss, and Shaina Feinberg, along with writing groups Visions, 80 Arts, Emmanuel Baptist Church’s Prime Time, and the Brooklyn Public Library’s Coney Island branch. Our MC for the evening is none other than MoCADA Executive Director James Bartlett.

Want more? Then, join us on Wednesday, October 24 at 6:00pm at the Jefferson Market Library, located at 425 6^th Avenue in Manhattan where Workshop leader Derek Loosvelt will continue the Writing Aloud Reading Series with readings from NYWC workshop leader Tory Meringoff, and readings from the Creative Center, the Center for Independence of the Disabled of New York, College & Community Fellowship, and SAGE writing groups, as well as Brooklyn-based author Jon Sands.

Visit our website for more information about 10 Days of NYWC events and the $10 Challenge!