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Episode 38: Books from All Angles: A Publisher, Editor and Book Reviewer Brian Hurley

Episode 38: Books from All Angles: A Publisher, Editor and Book Reviewer Brian Hurley

by | Jul 28, 2016 | Show

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Guilt, failure, negative reviews… We dig into the good stuff and the hard stuff with the wonderful Brian Hurley, a publisher, editor and passionate reviewer of books, including what authors need to know going into publishing. We discuss why, when a book wins an award, it's Amazon ratings will actually go down! Big publishers operated on a "Hollywood model" where a few successes support many "failures," and Brian looks at the alternative small presses supply, plus the importance of knowing what you want out of publishing. We also talked about book reviewing as a creative and intellectual and exciting activity, what makes a strong review and the process of writing one, and the broad and deep and eclectic way Brian immersed himself in the art of the book review until he understood the form and its patterns. Brian is knee-deep in forthcoming book. What's that like? How does he choose which books to review? Hint: "Henry James is going to have to wait." We got into how editing impacts his writing. He writes the marketing copy as he writes his book, again and again, sometimes letting the marketing copy lead the plot. In addition to running Fiction Advocate, a small press and online publication interested in the cross-pollinations of criticism, personal essay and fiction, he works for Callisto Media, a start-up book publisher, that uses an SEO model with a high rate of success: "we don't publish any splashy books, but they rarely, rarely fail." We discuss both these ventures as well as who should not review books, father-son relationships, dead dads, and more.

Links Discussed:

Matthew Galloway

Isaac Fitzgerald Interview

Maria Bustillos on Isaac Fitzgerald


The Scientists By Marco Roth

Ethan Canin interview on Terri Gross

 

Brian Hurley

Brian Hurley

Brian Hurley is Books Editor at The Rumpus and an Editor at Fiction Advocate. His literary criticism has appeared in The Millions, Electric Literature, and Full Stop. Formerly the linguistics editor at Oxford University Press, he is now a Senior Managing Editor at Callisto Media in Berkeley, CA.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

Episode 37: Shaping Memoir, Inventing Scene: A Discussion with Ground-breaking Feminist Economist Myra Strober

Episode 37: Shaping Memoir, Inventing Scene: A Discussion with Ground-breaking Feminist Economist Myra Strober

by | Jul 21, 2016 | Show

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We had an inspiring and far-ranging conversation with feminist economist Myra Strober about her new memoir, Sharing the Work:What My Family and Career Taught Me About Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others). We examined differences between memoir writing, fiction, and academic writing, and how Myra used theme as a filter to shape and cut her memoir. We talked about changing names, asking for permission, and sharing the work ahead of time with the people who are in it; uses of summary and scene and the balance between the two; tight writing and loose writing; memory versus invention in scene and especially in dialogue, and the unexpected relationship between truth and guessing. We delved into the economics of being a writer, and into writing habits or the lack thereof, and into time as a character. Literacy and its far-ranging impacts came up, as did dream writing, writing in dreams, and writing in the middle of the night.

 

LINKS:

Ellen Sussman

Diane Middlebrook/ her biography of Anne Sexton

Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse

Y Tu Mama Tambien

Bill Clegg Did You Ever Have a Family?

MryaStrober.com

Sharing the Work:What My Family and Career Taught Me About Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others)

 

Myra Strober

Myra Strober

Myra Strober is a labor economist and Professor Emerita at the School of Education at Stanford University. She is also Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University (by courtesy). Myra’s research and consulting focus on gender issues at the workplace, and work and family. She is the author of numerous articles on occupational segregation, women in the professions and management, the economics of childcare, feminist economics and the teaching of economics. She is also co-author, with Agnes Chan, of The Road Winds Uphill All the Way: Gender, Work, and Family in the United States and Japan (1999).

Myra is officially retired, but she continues to teach a course on work and family at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Myra was the founding director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford. She was also the first chair of the National Council for Research on Women (now called Re: Gender), a consortium of U.S. centers for research on women, which today has more than 100 member centers. Myra was President of the International Association for Feminist Economics, and Vice President of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund (now Legal Momentum). She was an associate editor of Feminist Economics and a member of the Board of Trustees of Mills College.

Over the years, Myra has consulted with several corporations on improved utilization of women in management and on work-family issues. She has also been an expert witness in cases involving the valuation of work in the home, sex discrimination, and sexual harassment.

Myra holds a BS degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University, an MA in economics from Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT.

Myra is married to Dr. Jay Jackman. She also has one ex-husband, two grown children, three grown step- children, one son-in-law, three daughters-in-law, and six grandchildren.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

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