Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:
“…I always want to, in my fiction, think less about how can I tell this story and more about how can I take this feeling, which I know is a real feeling and a real experience, and solidify it. Make it something that other people can see, and then we can talk about it.” Alexandra Kleeman talks about writing fiction, keeping a journal, and her obsession with the Fruitarian movement. (Creative Independent)
Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew is writing an authorized prequel to Dracula, using Stoker’s original, unedited version of the famous vampire novel, as well as the author’s journal and Stoker family lore. The prequel will be published in 2018. (Guardian)
On Tuesday a federal jury in Los Angeles ruled in favor of Waverly Scott Kaffaga, John Steinbeck’s stepdaughter, in a lawsuit against Thomas and Gail Steinbeck, the writer’s son and daughter-in-law, over the film rights to Steinbeck’s novels. Kaffaga will receive $13 million in damages. (Associated Press/USA Today)
In light of Trump’s decision to end DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), more than twenty poets—including Janine Joseph, Steph Burt, and Eileen Myles—share what the program means to them. (Harriet)
The owners of E. B. White’s farm in Brooklin, Maine, are selling the property for $3.7 million. The property, which inspired White’s classic children’s novel Charlotte’s Web, remains much as it was when White and his wife, the New Yorker fiction editor Katharine Sargeant Angell White, lived there from 1933 to 1985. (New York Times)
Atlas Obscura covers the seaside library built by Chinese architect Dong Gong on the East China Sea in 2015. The library is designed to offer an unobstructed view of the ocean from every seat; Gong says he wanted to create “a space where [visitors] can feel their relationship with the sea while holding a book.”
Hua Hsu joins cabdrivers, caregivers, street vendors, and retail workers for a writing workshop at the Worker Writers School, run by poet Mark Nowak in New York City. (New Yorker)
Epic Reads, Fierce Reads, I Read YA, Swoon Reads—Publishers Weekly surveys the online platforms publishers have designed to attract readers of young adult literature.
Speaking of platforms for finding young adult literature, the app We Read Too offers a database of more than a thousand YA titles written by writers of color about characters of color. App founder Kaya Thomas was featured in a Q&A for the May/June 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
