Category: words

The arzuhalciler, petition writers or public scribes who set up shop in the streets, go back to the early years of the Ottoman Empire, composing and writing legal documents for citizens to submit to courts and government offices. There are still a very few of them left (despite the efforts of Turkey’s legal profession to get rid of them), and reporter Joshua Allen meets two of them.

Only in America do we ask our writers to believe they don’t matter as a condition of writing. It is time to end this. Much of my time as a student was spent doubting the importance of my work, doubting the power it had to reach anyone or to do anything of significance. I was already tired of hearing about how the pen was mightier than the sword by the time I was studying writing. Swords, it seemed to me, won all the time.

Nineteen-year-old Allan Monga, who arrived (legally) in Portland last year as a refugee from Zambia, won the Maine state finals of the NEA’s Poetry Out Loud contest last month. All state champions are supposed to get an all-expenses-paid trip to the national finals in DC next week – but the NEA says its rules permit only US citizens to compete. Monga and Portland Public Schools have filed suit; reporter Ray Routhier looks at the legal issues involved.

“Based on my reporting, my own experience, and interviews with more than a dozen writers, the current median price for a freelancer’s work is between 25 and 50 cents per word (though, to be clear, most places no longer pay per word; they pay lump sums that work out to about $500 for a 1,000- to 2,000-word article). Speaking to Black Enterprise, Ben Carruthers, vice president of the Society of American Travel Writers, suggested that a similar $500 rate was standard…in 1977.”

Ousted editor James Marcus says that his dispute with publisher Rick MacArthur was over Katie Roiphe’s “The Other Whisper Network: How Twitter feminism is bad for women,” the magazine’s March cover story. The essay attracted attention – including a brief boycott of Harper’s by writers – following reports that Roiphe planned to use it to out the creator of the crowdsourced list of “Shitty Media Men” who had engaged in predatory behavior toward female colleagues.

“The book, which was believed to have been written by [Alex] Malarkey with his father, Kevin, was pulled from print in 2015 after Malarkey, still a minor, recanted his story. Today, at 20-years-old, Malarkey alleges that his father was the sole author of the book, and he is suing Tyndale [House Publishers] for defamation, deceptive trade practices, and five other charges.”

Andrew Sean Greer: “I think every novelist has a list of novels they never wrote – and never plan to write. Some are impossible dreams. Some are good ideas over a bad bottle of wine. And some are, let’s admit it, just bad ideas. Really bad ideas. So for what it’s worth, a little advice …”

“[Tracy K.] Smith, the fifth African-American to hold the title, has put an unexpected spin on it. She is taking poetry on the road around the nation, focusing primarily on rural areas where most writers are unlikely to visit.” She say, “This is a strange period where, nationally, we’re being reminded or convinced of the great divisions that separate coastal and urban communities from the central and rural communities. I’ve always distrusted that. I think there are lots of places where we have something very clear, compelling and welcome to say to one another.”

“Archaeologists in Sudan have uncovered a large cache of rare stone inscriptions at the Sedeinga necropolis along the Nile River. The collection of funerary texts are inscribed in Meroitic, one of Africa’s earliest written languages.”