On the Road Again: Alabama Book Festival
For the second straight weekend, I’m off to a city I’ve never visited before for a literary event—this time around, it’s the Alabama Book Festival in Montgomery, where I’ll be taking part in a panel about the publishing industry and what current circumstances and looming developments hold in store for authors. (I’ll be joined by publicist Julie Schoerke, radio journalist Stephen Usery, and novelist Susan Gregg Gilmore, the last of whom I met last year at Virginia’s Festival of the Book.)
It’s shaping up to be a pretty fun day; my friends Kathy Patrick and Karen Spears Zacharias will also be on hand, as well as some authors I’ve been interested in for a while, including Elise Blackwell, Ace Atkins, and Daniel Wallace, and big-name writers like Pearl Cleage, Rick Bragg, and Robert Hicks. And that’s just for starters. If any of you reading this are in the neighborhood, come on down—did I mention it’s free?
15 April 2010 | events |
The Voluptuous Horror of Louisa May Alcott
A few weeks ago, Lynn Messina asked me if I would be interested in hosting a literary event at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in which she, as the author of Little Vampire Women, would be teaming up with Porter Grand, the author of Little Women and Werewolves. Why, of course, I said; and would you like me to interview the two of you up there on the stage while we’re at it? Well, it turned out they already had a Louisa May Alcott biographer named John Matteson (Eden’s Outcasts) to handle that aspect of the evening—and good thing, too, as he’s probably much better qualified to talk about Alcott’s background in potboiler fiction. (For one thing, I’ve never actually even read Little Women, so I have my research work cut out for me over the next few weeks.)
So come join us at the Thalia on Thursday, May 6, as Messina and Grand discuss the challenges of taking a beloved American classic and rewriting it from top to bottom, and how you add a whole mess of monsters while still keeping the story close enough to the original to make the premise work. Among other things!
13 April 2010 | events |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
