Creative 04/15/2022
This week, art imitates life, socialites abound, David Mamet raises eyebrows, and so much more.
UP FOR DISCUSSION
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LIFE IMITATES ART
-Nancy Crampton-Brophy, the self-published romance novelist who wrote “How To Murder Your Husband” (the post is no longer public) for See Jane Publish is now standing trial on allegations that she, well, murdered her husband in 2018.
-According to a CNN report about Brophy’s trial, “on the morning of June 2, 2018, someone shot [her husband] Daniel Brophy in the kitchen of the Oregon Culinary Institute, where he taught cooking.” Crampton-Brophy was charged with the murder and arrested three months later, and is pleading “not guilty,” despite a mountain of evidence stacked against her, including “footage of her driving to and from the scene, a Glock that matched the gunshot wounds on the body, reports from neighbors about strange behavior following the incident,” Vulture reports. Crampton-Brophy herself wrote on her website, “The old adage is true. Be careful what you wish for, when the gods are truly angry, they grant us our wishes.”
DAVID MAMET TURNS FAR RIGHT
This week, acclaimed playwright David Mamet raised eyebrows in a heated appearance on Fox News wherein he regurgitated popular right-wing talking points, “alleging that teachers are ‘inclined’ to pedophilia and that children are being ‘groomed’ for sexual abuse,” Rolling Stone reports. “Mamet also, it might be worth mentioning in light of his recent comments, wrote a screenplay of Lolita.“
WHAT’S NEXT FOR SUBSTACK?
After seeing exponential growth in 2020, Substack “finds itself no longer a wunderkind but a company facing a host of challenges,” the New York Times reports. Among its issues: readers don’t have the same appetite for newsletters they had back in the first wave of the pandemic, and writers – including some that Substack paid generously to contribute – are starting to move away from the site, “often complaining about the company’s moderation policy or the pressure to constantly deliver.”
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SOCIALITES
This week was a big one for celebrity spottings – and I include famous writers in that. An East Village event held by the Poetry Project was attended by the likes of Chloë Sevigny and Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova, who were photographed together. Marlon James, Seth Meyers, Leslie Jamison, and Viet Thanh Nguyen all attended the Poets & Writers’ gala (ok, this was in early April, but still).
DRAMA AT DUKE, AN UPDATE
Following the tumult at the lefty academic Duke University Press, covered in last week’s newsletter, editor Joshua Gutterman Tranen announced that not only is he leaving the press, he’s leaving publishing altogether. “I’ve taken a job that doesn’t demand I live in financial precarity,” he wrote in a tweet.
NATIONAL POETRY MONTH – WEEK TWO
What’s/the most/poetic thing/you did/this week? Personally, I made a daisy chain for my dog and found a fistful of little shells on the beach to give to someone I love. I also really like this Frank O’Hara bot on Twitter that reposts simple & pure poems like this one and this one.
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BEST OF LIT TWITTER
-Did you write a “masterpiece, or a disasterpiece”? Casey Dunn’s kid coins a new word for messy drafts.
-@vic_toriawrites asks, “What is the title of a poem, cnf or fiction piece that *you* wrote that you’re most proud of?”
-Richard Scott Larson wants to know, “how do you deal with sometimes having to mention the same personal experiences in multiple books/essays?”
IN MEMORIAM
Patricia MacLachlan, author of the acclaimed childrens’ book Sarah, Plain and Tall, died this week at age 84.
AWARD ZONE
-The National Endowment for the Humanities announced its grant recipients this week, awarding $33.17 million in funding to projects by organizations including Union Docs, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the First Peoples Fund.
-The National Book Foundation awarded its “5 Under 35” to Alexandra Chang (Days of Distraction), Claire Sestanovich (Objects of Desire), Alyssa Songsiridej (Little Rabbit), Crystal Hana Kim (If You Leave Me) and Joseph Han (Nuclear Family).
-It wouldn’t be an issue of Study Hall Creative without a shoutout to Brandon Taylor, who won LitHub’s Story Prize this week for his new book, Filthy Animals.
-The New York Public Library announced its Cullman Center Fellows for 2022-2023. The award offers work space, institutional support and archive access to academics and writers. Brandon Taylor also won this award (!) for fiction work, along with C Pam Zhang, Claire Luchette and Daniel Saldaña París. Colin Channer will be the poetry fellow, and nonfiction writers Francesca Wade, Rozina Ali, Patrick Phillips and Raghu Karnad will also be fellows.
-The Guggenheim Fellowships announced the winners this week, including Jennifer Croft, Rebecca Makkai, Hernan Diaz and Maaza Mengiste in Fiction. General Nonfiction winners include Melissa Febos, Michael Pollan, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Rebecca Donner. Poetry winners include Tomás Q. Morín, Eduardo C. Corral, Valzhyna Mort and Joyelle McSweeney.
CRAFT CORNER
-At the New York Review of Books, Colm Tóibín talks to Jazz Boothby about Almodóvar, writing poetry, and what he’s reading.
-Brilliant book critic (formerly of the New York Times, now of the New Yorker) Parul Seghal speaks to Zachary Fine at The Oxonian Review about criticism, critics, and the “last-minute frenzy” of writing a first draft.
-At LARB, Jennifer Egan talks to Rachel Barenbaum about technology, loneliness, and Egan’s new book, The Candy House.
DEALS, DEALS, DEALS
-Quercus acquired UK rights to the upcoming trilogy continuing Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo series and Yann Martel (Life of Pi) sold his new novel, Son of Nobody, to Canongate at the London Book Fair this week.
-Elissa Altman sold On Permission, “a craft manifesto and meditation meant to inspire, support, and lead creatives in every arena through the emotional hazards, pitfalls, and joys of art making” to Godine.
PAGE TO SCREEN
-Apple TV+ announced the actor who will star in a TV adaptation of Rick Riordan’s celebrated kid’s books, Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
-Sally Rooney gets even sadder with a new Phoebe Bridgers song debuting as the soundtrack for the Conversations with Friends trailer.
-Lilliam Rivera’s 2020 YA novel, Never Look Back, will be adapted into a feature film written by Talia Rothenberg (#ThisIsCollege) and directed by Zetna Fuentes (Pretty Little Liars, Jane the Virgin)
-From Under the Banner of Heaven to Where the Crawdads Sing, more than 30 books are being turned into movies and TV shows this spring, Vulture reports.
HIGHLIGHTING LITERARY HISTORY
-At The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance drools over “the 12 most unforgettable descriptions of food in literature.”
-For Lapham’s Quarterly, Emma Garman elegantly depicts Aldous Huxley’s sun-drenched days as a young lothario in an Oxfordshire salon.
-Gregory McNamee honors the 70th anniversary of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for Kirkus Reviews.
RECOMMENDED READING
-Julian Lucas dives into the fight to repatriate artworks stolen from African countries and exhibited in European museums for the New Yorker.
-At The Nation, Victor Pickard argues against Elon Musk’s role in Twitter – and moguls owning media platforms, generally.
-This one’s niche, but at Gawker, Erin Somers unspools the etymology of Künstlermania.
-At The Irish Times, fifteen writers name their favorite “neglected gems” i.e. books that should be more widely read.
-After Ashley Tisdale’s awkward bookshelf confession, Elle Hunt considers the trend of “furnishing rooms with books you haven’t read” for The Guardian.
-As vendors on Etsy put their shops on vacation mode to oppose rising fees from the site’s backend, the Furry community is throwing its weight behind the workers (as reported by EJ Dickson for Rolling Stone).
LOVE FOR LOCAL BOOKSTORES
-At Bookriot, Connie Pan covers National Library Outreach Day, which uplifts the legacy of bookmobiles.
-Jeff Deutsch, director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, speaks to Sam Gee about “new models to support bookstores as vital community institutions” and his new book, In Praise of Good Bookstores. Deutsch also penned his own essay for Slate, asking, “What kind of bookstore browser are you?”
-As part of a new series at LitHub, indie booksellers are sharing their book recommendations. The first shop in the spotlight is East Nashville’s The Bookshop, with suggestions including They (Kay Dick), This Thing Between Us (Gus Moreno), and Memorial (Bryan Washington).
AND EVERYTHING ELSE
-This week in vintage comic book sales, a rare first edition Captain America comic from 1941 sold for $3.1 million. The crusader’s cartoon debut “featur[ed] the memorable cover image of the superhero socking a stunned Hitler while fending off Nazi bullets,” and was released less than a year before the US joined World War II.
-As the interminable and depressing discourse about book bans continues, the New York Public Library is making four contested books available to readers anywhere in the US. Included in the list are Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds), The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger), Speak (Laurie Halse Anderson), and King and the Dragonflies (Kacen Callender).
-“The book sales boom is over,” Jim Milliot writes for Publisher’s Weekly, and documents a nearly 9% decrease in print book sales during Q1 2022. It’s not all bad, though: sales at physical bookstores rose 27% in February 2022, marking a shift off the internet and into the shops.
–Emily Drabinski will be the American Library Association President for the 2023-2024 year.
–Book fairs are back in person in London, Buenos Aires, and Madrid.
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