This week I started reading Erasure, Percival Everett’s 2001 novel about how African-American literature is perceived and discussed in the literary mainstream. (This 2001 novel was adapted into the film American Fiction, which was nominated for an Oscar last year, and which I wrote about here.) I find the title of this novel especially relevant at this time of year, as the annual celebration in the U.S. known as Black History Month draws to a close, and as attempts to erase our nation’s Black history continue. At all levels of government, in schools, colleges, and universities, and in the corporate world, Black History Month celebrations have been “muted,” as Forbes puts it, due to a rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives and practices. One highly visible example: on the eve of Black History Month, newly appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth barred the DoD from using “official resources, to include man-hours, to host celebrations or events” related to Black History Month and other “cultural awareness months.”)
Continue reading “Friday Five: the end of Black History Month”Month: February 2025
Thoughts on copywork
And my brief experiment with this process.
There’s this guy who used to be a dentist, but now he’s a marketing copywriter. His weekly newsletter for other marketing writers offers some good tips for, I think, just about any kind of writer.
A couple of months ago, this former dentist — Kieran Drew is his name — wrote about how copywork can help writers get better at the craft.
“Copywork,” he writes, “is where you copy, by hand, great writing.”
Continue reading “Thoughts on copywork”Friday Five: Q&A with MoonLit Getaway founder and editor Brandon Nadeau
‘We are a doom-scrolling alternative. A mixed bag of mixed metaphors where … the only common denominator is quality.’
As I and my fellow Missourians emerge from the vicious grip of a polar vortex from the north, where heartier types deal with these sub-zero temperatures and wind chills more frequently (and where thermometer readings are even lower, thanks to the Celsius scale), it seems fitting that today’s Friday Five highlights the work of a writer from north of the U.S. border, Brandon Nadeau, and the phenomenal literary magazine he launched last fall, MoonLit Getaway.
Brandon is a veteran of the Canadian Army (twice deployed to Afghanistan) originally from northern British Columbia, where he “snowboarded, played guitar in a metal band, and got bad grades in school.” He now lives, writes, and edits in Edmonton, Alberta. He serves as executive editor and fiction editor for MoonLit Getaway, which publishes fiction (including flash), poetry, and visual artwork every two weeks. He and his editorial team also publish book reviews and interviews with featured authors and artists on the website’s blog.
Continue reading “Friday Five: Q&A with MoonLit Getaway founder and editor Brandon Nadeau”Farewell, Witcraft, and thanks for the laughs
Another fine literary magazine is closing shop. This time it’s Witcraft, an online publication that, for the past couple of years, offered up a daily dose of comic relief in the form of fiction and poetry.
Witcraft founder and editor Doug Jacquier (featured in a recent Friday Five) recently announced his plans in a message to subscribers and on his Substack. He wrote:
Continue reading “Farewell, Witcraft, and thanks for the laughs”The 70% solution?
‘If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it.’
Something that sometimes hinders my progress as a writer is this nagging sense that whatever I create must be somehow perfect, and that whatever I’m working on — whether it’s the first draft or the fifteenth — is that maybe I need to remove the comma I inserted last time, or cut a word here or there, or even entire sentences. If I just tweak it a bit, I reason, it will be ready to submit.
(Seems odd to confess this here and now, given my recent post about my tendency to rush to get a story submitted to a publication. (Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, as Walt Whitman put it.)
A lot of other writers also grapple with their inner perfectionist, so I know I’m not alone.
Anyway, I was heartened to discover a nugget of writing advice to quiet the perfectionist in me.
Continue reading “The 70% solution?”