Hazlittiana

Short notice I'm afraid - have been too busy this week to deal with email and announcements properly, and am due some catch-up - but I am leading a workshop tomorrow at the CUNY Graduate Center on two of my favorite of Hazlitt's essays, 12-2pm. More information here.

This is not how you do it

I really liked Cathy Day's piece at The Millions on why it's a problem that short stories are so much easier to teach than novels in the context of a fiction workshop (and not just because it had a sentence in it that I felt I could have written myself - it applies to dissertation-writers, too, for whom the chapter-workshopping and chapter conferences sometimes go hugely awry!):

[W]riters of big things, like marathon runners in training, need to go on long runs regularly — alone or in small groups. They need water. They need good running shoes. And every once in awhile, they need someone driving by to beep their horn and give them a thumbs up. What they don’t need is for someone to stop them after the first mile and say, “You know what? Your first step out of the block wasn’t that great. Let’s work on your stride for awhile.”