New Offering from NewPages

Today's post by RBM over at Colorado State's Center for Literary Publishing examines a new source of information about contests and calls for submission. An excerpt:

Ambitious storytellers, like the graduate students who keep our English Department’s printing lab busy at night, can soon have all kinds of literary magazines and blogs crowding their computer monitors. And when we read, after browsing Khimaira’s website, that our 30-page, Tolstoy-inspired novelette isn’t eligible for the journal’s 2011 Fantastiki Fiction Contest, whose guidelines call for a story of fewer than 5,000 words set in Ancient Greece, we may feel led astray.

NewPages.com's LitPak can help writers avoid getting lost. Find this post and another by RBM at the CLP Editor's Blog.

In an Age of Great Nonfiction Writing, Too Much Nonfiction Writing?

via Colorado State University

Over the next two weeks RBM will be blogging for Colorado State University's Center for Literary Publishing, where he serves as a Colorado Review editorial assistant. His first post considers a debate about memoirs that's been brewing this month. An excerpt:

to read the New York Times Book Review as of late is to get the impression that the age of nonfiction, like that of Rome or America, has overstepped its bounds. The literary world, according to Times editor Neil Genzlinger, has been inundated by “a sea of people you’ve never heard of, writing uninterestingly about the unexceptional, apparently not realizing how commonplace their little wrinkle is or how many other people have already written about it.” Genzlinger’s guide for “would-be memoirists,” which conveys the kind of hollow feeling I get from reading sex advice columns, comes in four parts

To read this post and an upcoming interview with one of the Review's nonfiction contributors, visit the CLP Editor's Blog.

Update: Creative Nonfiction has flagged RBM's "Too Much Nonfiction Writing?" in its March newsletter along with a similar post worth reading, Brevity's "Listening to One Another: A Defense of the Memoir Genre."

The View from Pocatello

Above: Idaho State University's Benny the Bengal and pan con lechon from a Cuban grill helping to refashion an old stop on the Oregon Trail.

Negotiating the Personal/Academic Divide

Ganges Composition

RBM presented "Negotiating the Personal/Academic Divide: A Bibliographic Essay" at today's Intermountain Graduate Conference in Pocatello, Idaho. This year's interdisciplinary gathering on "Challenging Boundaries, Seeking Intersections" was co-hosted by Idaho State University and Utah State University.

At left: "Ganges Composition," a map of composition pedagogies RBM developed in support of the essay, based on satellite imagery of temperatures in Mars' Ganges Chasma.