History.com has a cool feature called this day in literary history. It mentions a notable literary event for every day of the year.

Today March 5, for instance, Charlotte Bronte wrote to the Reverend Henry Nussey, declining marriage. “The 23-year-old Bronte told him that he would find her “romantic and eccentric” and not practical enough to be a clergyman’s wife. Rather than marry, Bronte struggled as a teacher and governess to help support her brother Branwell’s literary aspirations. In the end, Branwell’s excesses destroyed him; his sisters, though, all became literary figures.”

Novelist Meg Cabot has an interview with Laini Taylor, whose YA novel Lips Touch was recently a National Book Award Finalist.

In it, Laini talks about her background in both writing and art–she majored in English but also went to art school:

Laini: Writing was my first love. When I look back now, I can see that my whole art journey was really an elaborate procrastination from writing. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and in college I majored in English and took writing workshops, planning (in the vaguest possible way) to take the publishing world by storm after graduation.

Laini: Well. There was one small problem. I didn’t actually write very much. Minor detail! I thought about writing a lot, but actual words on the page? Not so much. Writing was really hard, so, out of avoidance, I began to do art instead. It started as a hobby, but I got obsessed, and within a couple of years I was applying to art schools. It was years before I got back to writing seriously, and I can’t help but imagine all the books I might have written in that time. Still, I’m glad my life took that path. Art has been a great second career AND I met my husband in art school!

She also talks about her heroes, including Lady Oscar from a Japanese cartoon she watched as a kid (”She was Marie Antoinette’s kick-ass female bodyguard and she dressed and fought like a man but she was beautiful and had a great love story.”), and how she deal with rejection as a writer.

But. I have another way of dealing with rejection that’s much more fun: make enemies. Really. I have a secret nemesis, a writer who snubbed me at a convention once (no, I won’t say who!). Since then, I’ve only ever said his/her name in the way Seinfeld says “Newman!”

A great interview. Read it here.

I’m not sure which is a bigger expression of ego: to believe that your creative work is an expression of genius or to believe that creativity is a receptor of something special God sends just to you, and therefore by extension your work is an expression of God. (That is the logical end to her thinking here, right?) Nevertheless, Elizabeth Gilbert has some interesting thoughts about creativity and how to keep from being emotionally squashed by your own work. Plus she’s just so darn likable.

Hmm if this were true, I think all writers would be in trouble.

French novelist Camille Laurens is claiming that “fellow author Marie Darrieussecq committed “psychological plagiarism” with her 2007 book Tom is Dead. She says that Darrieussecq’s book is the retelling of the death of her newborn child, which she wrote about in her own 1995 book Philippe.

“Reading Tom Is Dead,” Laurens said, “I had the feeling that it had been written in my bedroom, that she (Darrieussecq) had sat on my chair, lain in my bed.”

Darrieussecq responded that retelling a story is not plagiarism. And she’s right. Plagiarism is to “present as new and original a product derived from an existing source,” (Merriam-Webster) i.e. stealing their words and passing them off as your own. What Darrieussecq has allegedly done is steal ideas. Ideas, the real commodity of writing, are not protected in the same way, nor should they be.

And so I have some advice for everyone: Never tell a writer a story if you aren’t comfortable with her writing about it. It’s a well-known fact that writers mine from life. They are always on the lookout for new stories and emotional material. If they are interested in your story, there’s a good chance some part of their mind is considering writing about it. And they just might do it.

Which doesn’t mean that Darrieussecq’s behavior is okay here. The person I know who has the best stories (Marcia) also happens to be another writer, and because of this I would never write about anything she tells me. That’s her material to do what she wants with, and to take that away from her would be a kind of stealing. Likewise I would never write about my close friends and family because that is disloyal. I want the people I love to trust me.

But that’s morality, that’s not legality. The fact is, there are many writers who have made a career out of stealing the ideas that they turn into part of their work. Some of it is okay, even wonderful. Some of it is morally icky. Either way, it’s a fact of the writing life. That’s why Lauren looks like a bit of a baby for complaining about it, especially since her own book was published 15 years ago. While it’s never fun to have another writer steal your ideas, it’s also a sign of a lesser creative mind. People steal what they do not have.

Ariana Reines, who wrote The Cow and Coeur de Lion, is a poet I like quite a bit. Jezebel is a woman-oriented culture blog that I used to like until they lost some of their good writers, lost their sense of humor, and started calling everything offensive to women, whether it is or not.

So maybe there’s a tinge of hypocrisy in this experience a Jezebel writer had at one of Reines’ poetry readings. The piece starts out on a bad note when the writer, Jenna Sauers, admits that she dislikes most poetry, and poets, for that matter. “I remain fundamentally very suspicious of any class of writer that considers a day when you come up with five lines to be the blistering height of productivity,” she says.

Still, she likes Reines’ poetry and she and her friends laugh at several points during the poem, which is titled, “When I Looked At Your Cock, My Imagination Died.” Therein begins the problem. See, Reines’ poem is very graphic in the way it talks about sex. It also contains some funny lines, like, “When I fuck you, I mean when I get banged, my tits like greased basketballs, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing.” So Jenna, her male friend, and possibly others laughed at these moments in the poem. Afterwards, a woman who turned out to be the poet Nada Gordon, did the following:

Then a woman across the aisle from me shot me and my two friends — also, full disclosure, periodic laughers — a withering look. “So,” she said. “I found myself really uncomfortable with the laughter during the part of your, um, you know, the, the sexier sections? Which I found, you know, powerful and formal and — all this other stuff going on. And I understand that laughter is something that naturally emerges in such situations, and it’s — but I just wanted to call attention to my discomfort.” There was silence, and then the audience went apeshit. (Or at least the most apeshit I have ever seen at a reading.)

By apeshit, I suppose Jenna means that several people spoke up that it bothered them too, including poet Eileen Myles, and then Jenna and her friends defended themselves, and finally Reines put a stop to it and read from her translation of Baudelaire. You can hear the entire exchange, not to mention the poetry, here.

It’s a fascinating situation. It brings to mind all kinds of issues, like the impossible-to-settle high and low art debate, acceptable reactions to graphic talk of sex and pornography (what is “mature” or not), gender dynamics, stereotypes about poets, and what reactions to art are okay to have. I have a couple of thoughts:

a. Jenna and her friends were perfectly right to laugh. The poem is funny! Not all the time, but often, and laughing seems a reasonable reaction to it. Eileen Myles wrote a long, somewhat bizarre response to Jenna’s post, where she says that Jenna is living a consumerist lifestyle and then says that Myles and her friends are intellectuals and that Jenna is “with the big dogs now, little puppy.” Aside from that, her point seems to be that the male friend with Jenna was laughing loudly and drawing attention to himself, and Myles interpreted that as his trying to hide his discomfort with all the sex-talk. “But your guy friend was doing that thing people who want everyone to know they REALLY GET IT do. The gross dominating laughter. It was like okay dude you’re all excited about the dirty talk,” she said.

I listened to the recording. The laughter didn’t seem particularly loud or dominated by one person, but maybe it was different if you were there. But even if it were, as someone who sometimes finds things inappropriately funny, it’s a little weird that his reaction to the poem was so harshly judged. There should be room for many reactions to poetry, especially if they are all positive, as was the case at this reading.

b. Q&A’s are painful. There’s always someone who has to give an irrelevant opinion or ask a dumb question, and it’s just something we all have to get through so that we can feel we’ve had a dialogue and that this is a literary event instead of a performance. I’m not saying that Nada Gordon said something dumb. I am just saying that everyone has their opinions at these events, and there is usually someone who wants to go off-topic or draw attention to other issues, and we all have to deal with it. It is the nature of readings. Jenna apparently needs to go to more of them to learn this. I hope she does. She lives in New York, after all.

c. I would be fascinated to hear what Reines thinks of the situation, but she’s probably smarter to keep her mouth shut.

Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries, wrote a long, honest article called Why I Write, which I enjoyed very much. It talks about how he got into writing, why writing is important to him, how little money it makes, how he deals with that, and how he writes. There’s some interesting stuff about the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, which Elliott attended, and details on his publishing life. For one thing, Elliott published 5 of his 7 novels without an agent. For another, he purposely avoids teaching or pitching magazines. He makes $30,000 a year writing, which is nothing in San Francisco, but he writes what he wants. It’s a trade-off, as he says. Some interesting points:

But how do writers get by? That’s more complicated than it sounds. What do we mean by “getting by”? Do we need as much as we think we do? How important is it to make more each year than the year before? While working on a first book, almost everyone has a job that has nothing to do with writing. When people tell me they would write if they had more time I’m always skeptical. The hardest-working fellows at Stanford rarely wrote more than four hours a day.

…

It sounds spoiled, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with considering yourself an artist. There are sacrifices as well as payoffs. When I was discussing my new book with two married writers, they kept asking how I could work without an advance. I didn’t see how they could work with one. They said they needed a certain amount of money and that they had children. They made their children sound like a tremendous burden, and I felt they were using the word need when they should have said want. There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing something higher than writing. The husband has sold a lot more books than I do and has plenty more money than I have, but being a writer seems to make him unhappy. One day, when he was telling me how easy I have it and about the kind of advance he needed, I snapped. I said his book wasn’t worth more than my book just because he has kids. We’re lucky to be writers. Nobody owes us anything.

More here.

Here’s a cool interview with Cormac McCarthy in The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

(Via BookNinja)

In the never-gets-old category: The Wall Street Journal asked a bunch of writers about their writing habits. Edwidge Danticat writes her books in those blue exam notebooks they give you during your college finals. Michael Ondaatje likes 8½-by-11-inch Muji lined notebooks. Richard Powers writes by speaking into voice-recognition software on his laptop.

Good stuff. I’m not sure why this topic continues to hold fascination for me since I have long since established my own peculiar writing habits, but it does. Maybe I’m checking to see if I’m doing it correctly?

I’m torn. I want to follow book news to keep up with the industry. At the same time, it’s so depressing. Every day, there’s an article, or two, or four, saying how publishing is dying, no one is reading, and no one is getting their books into print.

In real life, I don’t find this to be the case at all. People read plenty, books are dominating our cultural landscape, and I know lots of writers getting publishing deals or agents right now. I’m not saying there’s no truth whatsoever in the doom and gloom stuff, but sometimes it feels like everyone in the publishing industry is re-enforcing everyone else’s self-fulfilling prophesy. It makes me want to crawl into a closet and hide.

The reality is, writing has always been hard. And while I am concerned about aspects of the doom and gloom stuff, reading about it every day makes my own writing life suffer. It’s harder to write when I am discouraged.

So I go back and forth. I want to get the news and keep up with things, but I also don’t want to hear negative Nellys say that writing is pointless because in a few years, the book will be dead. The truth is, storytelling will never die. It’s part of being human. I know that perfectly well, but sometimes it’s hard to remember when everyone is bemoaning the coming book apocalypse.

In an essay in The New York Times, Arthur Krystal brings up something that has long bothered me as a writer. Why am I a good communicator in print, but a somewhat lousy one in person? Conversation is a very different art than writing, even though they both use words. Or put it another way, the process of bringing words out the fingertips takes a different part of the brain than bringing them out of the mouth. According to Krystal:

Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I’m expressing opinions that I’ve never uttered in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me. Nor am I the first to have this thought, which, naturally, occurred to me while composing. According to Edgar Allan Poe, writing in Graham’s Magazine, “Some Frenchman — possibly Montaigne — says: ‘People talk about thinking, but for my part I never think except when I sit down to write.”

Krystal believes that writing actually creates thoughts–and so it does, in the sense that it helps us organize a jumble of connections and emotions into coherent logic. Writing just engages with thought and language. With speaking, there are all these other things to worry about–whether one is being boring, whether the other person has had a chance to speak, whether a topic is polite to bring up, etc. etc. Also, there’s the matter of time. Ask me a question and I might not know the answer off the top of my head. I usually have to think about it to give you an intelligent answer. Thus, I stumble over my words in person. Allow me to write the answer to the question down and I can manage to sound pretty smart, especially if I can revise the thought a few times to make sure it makes sense.

And so, I am a writer and not a politician.