Ring the Bell, School’s Back in Session

Tonight I’ll be starting my second run as the instructor of the blogging workshop at New York University’s Center for Publishing, and I’m looking forward to it—the Center and I compared notes after last year’s classes, and we hit upon a few tweaks that I think will make it an even better experience for the students. (For one thing, we’ve switched from two six-hour sessions to six two-hour sessions.) The first night is largely an introduction to the concept of blogging and some of the highlights of its short history, for which I’m really grateful that Scott Rosenberg wrote Say Everything, a book that explains “how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and why it matters.” As I mentioned last year, Rosenberg provided “a great resource for discussing the blogosphere’s roots and identifying the stand-out characteristics of the first great blogs,” and it’s a great springboard for talking about two of the key principles I’ll be sharing with students: identifying your niche subject and refining your personal voice.

Rosenberg does a great job of making technological topics accessible to non-techie readers, and his previous book, Dreaming in Code, was probably the best effort I’d read in that vein since stumbling onto the Stephen Levy classic Hackers as a teenager—an experience which made me decide that there must be something to this whole “computer” racket and pretty much set me on the path that’s led to this point.

6 October 2010 | events |

Rachel Shukert & Emily Gould @ Greenlight

“It tells you something about me that, in case my acting career proved a failure, my only contingency plan was to publish an international bestseller. I’m sure that you are already aware of this. I just want you to know that I know it too.”—Rachel Shukert

Tonight I’ll be hosting the latest installment in the series of “author/blogger pairings” I’ve been organizing for Greenlight Bookstore (686 Fulton Street, Brooklyn), and I’m very excited to be welcoming my friend Rachel Shukert to read from Everything Is Going to Be Great, a memoir of how her efforts to make it as an actress after graduating from college led to a less-than-satisfactory trip to Europe for a background part in an avant-garde play, which was followed by an extended “time out” in Amsterdam that turned out even worse—but at least she can laugh about it all now, and so can the rest of us, right?

After Rachel reads, she’ll sit down for a conversation with my former colleague Emily Gould, who has also published an autobiographical book: And the Heart Says Whatever. Although she’s still most famous for her time at Gawker, for nearly a year now she’s been doing a cooking show/author interview series for The Awl called “Cooking the Books” that’s quite entertaining. So I’m looking forward to hearing what she and Rachel have to say once they get started—and I hope Beatrice readers in and around New York City will come check it out.

13 September 2010 | events |