Sometime this holiday season, I’m going to make my grandmother’s broccoli-cheese casserole. It’s gooey, it’s crunchy, and every time I smell it, it heightens how much I miss her.
That’s the thing about this Season of Eating — so much food, and almost all of it is laden with not just calories but memories, hopes, connections. It might be a challenge for our pants, but it’s a feast for our writing.
Continue reading “The Food Angle”
I’ve met so many unforgettable people in my years at Gotham I can’t remember them all. I’ll discuss one of them here because a documentary about him was recently released. It’s called Jacob and you’ll find it on Amazon Video. It’s fascinating, fun, and I’m a featured player, so lots of reasons to watch.
The person’s name is Jacob M. Appel. He used to teach fiction for Gotham, and he’s a prolific writer, having published countless short stories, several novels, not to mention plays, essays, and poems. But that’s not all. Continue reading “I’d Like You to Meet Jacob”
“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”