September 2023: Shana Tova 🍎🍯🕯️

Happy New Year. This month, read your own work in front of a live audience during Write Night, and check out Tessa Hadley and Abraham Verghese

Dear Writers,

I love what Tessa Hadley says about the “pressure of an audience” in Tessa Hadley’s Longing to Put Life Into Words, her Q&A with Deborah Treisman. Here at Sweet Lab, we try to provide that pressure of an audience. This week, we are holding our first-ever “Write Night” in NYC. Writers show up and read their work out loud. We’ve been running virtual writing workshops since March 2020 and will continue to do that. But nothing beats getting together in person. So once a month on Thursday nights, we invite you to come read 1-2 pages of your work out loud in person. The dates are Thursday, September 14, October 12 & November 16, 6-7 p.m. RSVP by clicking on the link below. This is a free, in-person event. We’ll let you know if it becomes hybrid.

Hadley’s new story collection, After the Funeral, came out in July. Along with Jennifer Egan, Danielle Evans, Lauren Groff, Alice Munro and Elizabeth Strout, Hadley is one of the best short story writers alive, IMHO. (Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad and Candy House, and Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, were sold as novels but read like short story collections.) We’ve discussed many of Hadley’s stories in class. Several in the new collection—After the Funeral, Dido’s Lament, The Bunty Club, Funny Little Snake, Cecilia Awakened, The Other One, and Coda—were originally published online; you can read them here.

• Jennifer Egan, A Journey from Homelessness to a Room of One’s Own (The New Yorker)

• Roxanne Gay, Coping Strategies: On Five Years of Writer’s Block (The Audacity)

• Elizabeth Harris, How Lauren Groff, One of ‘Our Finest Living Writers,’ Does Her Work (NY Times)

• Rebecca Makkai, Covid flipped the introvert-extrovert script. And I hate it (Washington Post)

• Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water: Overly long but excellent novel about characters connected to the Parambul estate, on South India’s Malabar coast. The most interesting storylines involve Digby Kilgour, Rune Orqvist and Mariamma, all surgeons, and Elsie, an artist. The novel begins with the marriage of a child bride, who at 12, marries a 40-year-old widower; she becomes the loving matriarch Big Ammachi. You expect things to go wrong, and they do, but in unexpected ways. Extraordinary scenes occur in a leper colony and Verghese withholds a major secret until the end. Though the book lags between 77%-92% (I read it on my Kindle), I devoured the last 50 pages. After you finish, listen to Oprah interview Verghese in the 6-part podcast she devotes to the book.

• Becky Tuch of Lit Mag News interviews editors of literary magazines and posts them on YouTube. Watch her interview editors of CRAFT, The Rumpus, The Hudson Review, the Opiate, Chill Subs, Fractured Lit, 100 Word Story, Literary Mama, Motherwell and others here.