Posts Tagged ‘criticism’

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This week in writing history: The Catcher in the Rye

In O'Pinions, Off-Topic on July 16, 2014 at 11:22 pm

Rye_catcher

On July 16, 1951, J.D. Salinger published a book that just about everyone (in this country, at least) has had to read at one point or another: The Catcher in the Rye. Some people love it, and some people (maybe more people) love to hate it—but others, myself included, just shrug and say, “Yeah, it was alright.”

This is actually something of a source of contention in my house. My fiancée hates Holden Caulfield with a vigorous passion; after all, he’s whiney and spends 200+ pages doing, well, basically nothing. I, on the other hand, think the book actually has some merits (and if I ever want to lose my fiancée, all I have to do is expound upon some of those merits aloud).

So it’s at great risk to my personal life (and possibly my blog followership) that I expound upon them here, if only silently: Read the rest of this entry »

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Multiple (writing) partners

In Writing on April 25, 2012 at 4:26 pm

I’ve been in Boston for more than two years now, and in that time I’ve met a number of people in various writing groups and workshops. And yet I’ve never joined up with one of them myself.

It’s not that I have anything against the process, exactly — I found my workshops in school to be extremely helpful, and it’s always good to have an unbiased audience for your work — but I’ve still never felt all that compelled to commit myself to a writing group outside of academia.

Maybe I just haven’t found the right fit yet, but for the time being I think I prefer writing in a vacuum, waiting to show my work until its finished according to my own tastes and standards.

Still I wonder: Not counting the blog-o-sphere as a writing group, how many people are in one?