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Rejecting Rejection

“The world is in turmoil—everybody is thinking about politics; nobody is thinking about memoir.”

That is just one of the many discouraging things editors and agents told Teresa Wong in late 2016 when she was trying to sell Dear Scarlet, her graphic memoir published this spring.

She also heard: no one wanted to read a book about post-partum depression; no one wanted to read a graphic memoir; and no one wanted to read a graphic memoir about post-partum depression.  Continue reading “Rejecting Rejection”

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The Shadow

Note to writers: This letter contains spoilers of the film Fatal Attraction. Be forewarned! 

Back when I was single, I accidentally scared off a few dates by mentioning that I sympathized with the character of Alex in the film Fatal Attraction.

Hear me out. 

You may recall — Alex (played by Glenn Close) has a weekend fling with her married co-worker, Dan (Michael Douglas), and when Dan spurns her for his wife, Alex loses it. She tries to win Dan back (one appeal involves a suicide attempt), and when she realizes he’s gone for good, she destroys his car, kidnaps his daughter, and in the movie’s most iconic scene, boils the family’s pet bunny. Continue reading “The Shadow”

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The Spotlight

In a funny coincidence, I spoke last month at the HippoCamp Creative Nonfiction conference, and both another speaker and myself accidentally quoted the exact same passage from the exact same book.

Who was this popular author? Toni Morrison? Trevor Noah? Nora Roberts?

Nope. Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Know what each sentence says,
What it doesn’t say,
And what it implies.
Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says. Continue reading “The Spotlight”