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Check out the audio programs available from the just-completed Virginia Festival of the Book. (The list of podcasts is in the right sidebar on the website.)
Clifford Garstang
Writing, Reading, Editing
Writing, Reading, Editing
>Check out the audio programs available from the just-completed Virginia Festival of the Book. (The list of podcasts is in the right sidebar on the website.)
>this is the first year that i didn’t go. i don’t miss it.
or actually i do, i miss the energy and the feeling of being around so many book people, but i also can’t help but feel resentment toward the publishing world. i think there’s something seriously wrong, and i’m quickly losing interest in being part of it. the comments on lrod recently about the insularity of mfa’s and about how short fiction is dead i think have really gotten to me, because they seem so true. but what can be done?
i don’t know, and that’s why i didn’t show up this year.
>Well, I admit to being more discouraged right now than I’ve been in a long time. But then I’m just about to finish a new book, so it could get worse when the rejections for that start piling up. I don’t buy the “insularity of the mfa” thing, and I don’t really think that short fiction is dead. But I do think there are big changes going on: with online publishing burgeoning, the print journals will die; and with corporate publishers focusing on blockbusters, non-profit literary presses, who can publish short fiction, will emerge. So maybe I don’t have to be so discouraged after all.