Category: words

The Culture Of Competitive Masculinity At The Iowa Writers’ Workshop

This “masculinist logic” infected the classroom. Criticism had always been central to the Workshop experience, and it was harsh by design. Engle believed “that young writers overestimated their creative powers, a flaw that only astringent criticism could overcome.” Cisneros put it more simply: “There was no love.” The poet Robert Bly described how “the aggression went against each other,” as students tore apart works in progress. Praise was uneven, and favoritism was everywhere.  – The New Republic

Redefining “Common” Language Is A Fraught Exercise

Looking at Amherst College’s new Common Language Guide: What the glossary contains is not “common” language by any normal reckoning. Its very first entry defines “accomplice” as “a term coined by Indigenous Action Network to critique the ways in which ‘ally’ as an identity term has been deployed absent of action, accountability or risk-taking.” Such definitions signal that we have departed the real world for an alternative progressive universe filled with specialized terminology and in-house references. – Commonweal

The Poetic, Bombastic, Brilliant Art Of Old-School Sports Writing

“The brilliant hard-boiled lyricism of Sandy Grady, in 1964, as he watches a crowd of Phillies fans after a home loss: ‘They hit the sidewalk with tight mouths, like people who had seen a train hit a car.’ Or Joe Palmer, in 1951, summoning a vision of the racehorse Man o’ War in motion: ‘Great chunks of sod sailed up behind the lash of his power.'” – The Atlantic

Modern Library To Release New Low-Cost Series Of Classics By Women Authors

“The Modern Library will launch a new trade paperback series, Modern Library Torchbearers, this May. The series, the publisher said, will ‘honor a more inclusive vision of classic books’ by ‘recognizing women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.’ The books, all previously published, will be repackaged, and each will be introduced by a contemporary woman writer.” – Publishers Weekly

Katy Waldman Was Reviewing A Novel. Then She Found Herself In It. And On It Goes From There.

Well, she’s pretty sure she found herself — more specifically, an essay she wrote about herself and her twin sister — but the novel’s author differs. And the author of another book claims she found more of it in Waldman’s essay than Waldman credited her for. (Waldman differs, as does her editor, who was her twin sister.) Waldman digs into all this here, in a very meta essay. – The New Yorker