Polish Your Writings Skills During Reading Week

Daniel Selsam '09 writes in to tell us that there will be two special Reading Week writing workshops:

On Writing Clearly

Bring your tough sentences.

Host: writing tutor Daniel Selsam
When: Tuesday, December 9th 3:45 pm
Where: PAC 104


On Writing Poorly

Struggling between vagueness and obfuscation? Come to this workshop.

Host: writing tutor Max Krafft
When: Tuesday, December 9th, 4:45 pm
Where: PAC 104

Editor's note: I find this a little goofy - I mean, really - if you're going to go to just one workshop, and your choices are "On Writing Clearly" vs. "On Writing Poorly," well, it seems kind of self-evident. But Calvin seems to have other ideas...

Fire the Generator: A New Writing Series

Chiara DiLello '10 sends us this heads up:

The Writing Program and Writing Hall Present Fire the Generator: A New Writing Series featuring Yolanda Wisher and Mark Palacio.

Hailing from Germantown, North Wales, Brooklyn, and Belize, the duo of poet Yolanda Wisher and doublebassist Mark Palacio creates an intimate conversation between spoken word and jazz.

Read Yolanda's poetry here

Yolanda's myspace

Date: Wednesday, November 12

Time: 8:00PM

Location: Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies

David Foster Wallace Is Dead

Sad news for the literary world - influential writer David Foster Wallace, 46 years old, was found dead of suicide on Friday at his California home.

I haven't been so ambitious as to tackle the 1,079-page "Infinite Jest", which is by many accounts a sprawling, complex, darkly humorous masterpiece of postmodern literature, and now I will feel a little worse about this neglect.

Links:
NY Times obit: David Foster Wallace Found Dead
Salon: In Memory of David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
Michiko Kakutani: Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok

Kick Up Noise needs a committee

Kick Up Noise: A Journal of First-Year Writing, founded by the Writing Program in an effort to provide more publication opportunities for writers in their first year at Wes, will publish its inaugural issue in December. Kick Up Noise accepts poetry, fiction and nonfiction, as well as scripts and academic writing.

But first, the journal needs a submissions committee that will meet several times throughout the semester to review submissions to the magazine on an anonymous basis.

If you're interested, send your name, WesBox, and residence to kickupnoise@gmail by October 1. Include answers to the following questions:

• What is your previous publication experience?
• Why do you want to be part of the submissions committee?
• What role do you think a freshman publication can play on the Wesleyan campus?

Hilton Als to read at Russell House

Hilton Als, the English Department's 2008 Millet Writing Fellow, will be performing a reading at the Russell House on Wednesday, brought to you by the Wesleyan Writing Program and the English Department. The event is free, and open to the public.

Says Joanna Tice '07, Russell House Arts Fellow:

Hilton Als has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. Prior to that, he was a staff writer at The Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. His first book, The Women, a meditation on gender, race, and personal identity, was published in 1996. He collaborated on film scripts for Swoon and Looking for Langston, and has edited and contributed to numerous museum catalogues, including the catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art." In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03.

Date: Wednesday, April 2
Time: 8:00 PM
Location: Russell House

Alum Author Gets Prolific in Middle Age

Wesleyan-graduated artists seem to have been especially prolific recently - Gabriel Cohen '82, currently residing in Brooklyn, has published three books in different genres in the past year: "Boombox", a literary novel about gentrification in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill; "The Graving Dock", a more commercial crime novel; and “Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky: A Buddhist Path Through Divorce”, a chronicle of his messy divorce.

Mr. Cohen was born in Austin, Tex., and lived in Afghanistan and Rio de Janeiro as a boy, while his father helped train elementary schoolteachers, before settling in Washington. After attending Wesleyan University in Connecticut and stints in a rock band and at a weekly newspaper, Mr. Cohen moved to New York, taking day jobs to get by. (He has in recent years written occasionally for the City section of The New York Times.)

He wound up in Boerum Hill on Wyckoff Street, where today about the biggest threat on the sidewalk is having your foot run over by a baby stroller. But back in 1989 the block was more dangerous. “I’d hear gunshots at night,” he said outside his old apartment. “I got mugged on this block.”

He was writing a novel there in 1991 when what he called a “writer’s nightmare” began: a teenage neighbor bought a club-size public-address system and began blasting gangsta rap in the courtyard. “I tried talking to him and his mother,” Mr. Cohen said. “She told me, ‘This isn’t Westchester.’ ”

Probably not the kind of rude awakening imminent Wes grads might hope for if/when moving to Brooklyn... but you can dream!

George Orwell Writing Tips

Writing a paper? How about some free advice from one of world's most famous writers, George Orwell?

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.