Image via Wikipedia

Encyclopedia Virginia is looking for an Assistant Editor. Knowledge of and interest in Virginia history a big plus. This will be a full time classified staff position at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. For more information, contact Brendan Wolfe at EV.

And there’s more! According to Brendan:

We’re entering into a partnership with the Library of Virginia that involves publishing on our site the entirety of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography. At the same time, we’re beginning to edit our pre-colonial and colonial history sections and are developing a smart-phone application that uses one’s current geographical coordinates to identify nearby historical events and connect them to encyclopedia entries. It’s pretty cool — all of which is to say that this is a great time to join the staff.

Just a reminder that this Thursday at 7pm, WriterHouse welcomes critically acclaimed young writer Josh Weil, whose book of three novellas, The New Valley, is set in southwest Virginia. He’ll be discussing “The Renegade Form: The Case for the Novella in Contemporary Fiction.” Book signing to follow. Free and open to the public.

”Weil meticulously imagines people and their histories, and presents them as a product of their places. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a fiction writer of any age, working in any form, to accomplish….Keep writing novellas, Josh Weil, because you write very good ones.” —The New York Times Sunday Book Review

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This Saturday is the first session of our new class “Essentials of Mystery Writing,” taught by Meredith Cole, author of Posed for Murder. Space is still available, but if you don’t have time to register before Saturday morning, please call 296-1922 or email us (classes@writerhouse.org) to let us know you’d like to come. The rest of the classes begin next week: “Shaping the Language of Poetry” and “Creative Writing: Beginning the Journey” on Monday, “Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Telling the Truth” on Wednesday, and “Evening Fiction Workshop: A Dialogue Between Writers” on Thursday. Complete descriptions and online registration:

http://www.writerhouse.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=61&Itemid=89

But don’t wait—register now if you want to learn about blogging, social networks, websites and how to be a freelance writer on the web. This is a soup-to-nuts picture of what it means to be a writer in the digital world, led by copywriter and communications consultant Kristen King. The first part is an introduction and the second part is a hands-on follow up. Part 1: Saturday, August 15, 9am – 4:30 pm, Part 2: Saturday September 12, 9am-4:30pm. More info…

via One Reason Magazines Are Suffering: Their Covers – The Daily Beast

Whether they write novels or cover stories or op-eds, even the most talented women writers often aren’t validated in the same way that their male counterparts are. While there are few Neanderthals who would publicly say that the byline gap in literary journals and periodicals is due to the fact that women can’t write as well as men, the usual justifications include shrugging dismissals like, “We don’t get enough quality submissions by women.” When I pointed out the 5:29 byline ratio of the fall 2006 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review on my website, for instance, the journal’s editor, Ted Genoways, commented on the post that, “Unfortunately, the disparity in our issues is, I think, more reflective of a symptom than a root cause; there simply seem to be fewer women who are freelance journalists, travel writers, and political pundits—three areas that now largely compose our editorial content. As a result, the good ones are in high demand and often out of our price range.”

via The Ambition Condition | Bitch Magazine

Perhaps this is not the best example Clark could have used. I think Genoways’ response falls short of being dismissive. He’s not excusing himself by saying that he’s failing to find quality female contributors, he’s saying he can’t afford them, and that does speak to a possible problem with the available pool of talent. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem to some extent (why go into freelance journalism if no one like you ever gets published?) but chicken-egg problems tend to be systemic, not the kind you can pin on one particular editor.

What I find more egregious is the ongoing trend of relegating women to the soft stories in the back of magazines like The Atlantic or the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, or to “XX” sections of websites. I could not be more weary of reading articles about how challenging it is to find just the right shoes for a party or how difficult it is to find good domestic help. One more story about best friends who almost lose their friendship over a misunderstanding but then bring it back from the brink over skim lattes will send me over the brink. I’d rather read a measly five meaty articles in VQR than 500 more personal essays about purses or menopause or mammograms. And I much prefer a magazine like VQR that markets itself to the general reader to one that feels it has to set aside a few pages for the ladies.

But other than that small point, the Bitch article is great — go read it.

WriterHouse offers solace for Virginia writers – 10.14.08

Virginia has been home to many famous authors from Edgar Alan Poe, Willa Cather, and Booker T. Washington, to John Dos Passos, William Styron, Tom Wolfe, and John Grisham. Now some Charlottesville women have opened a place where the next generation of writers can meet, work, and party. WVTF’s Sandy Hausman paid a visit to WriterHouse, just off Preston Avenue, in the shadow of Bodo’s Bagels.

Listen

via News and Notes | WVTF Public Radio – Classical, Jazz, NPR

From a science story in the Wall Street Journal:

The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision — an eternity at the speed of thought.

But…wait…the time it takes to make up our minds..that is the speed of thought. And who is this brain that makes up its mind before we have time to make up our…mind? Is it a brain in a jar? If so, why is it running my life?

Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for some choices we make are understood only by our cells. The findings lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut — not by thinking about them too much.

Our cells “understand” the choices “we” make, which is why we should use our…gut? Metaphors amok!

And from the Washington Post Sunday Book section:

After finishing this book, I wandered for days staring at my three daughters and countless nephews and nieces, seeing how fragile and dangerous their lives could easily become in a time of war, starvation, and betrayal.

Having nearly 40 first cousins myself, I can’t help being skeptical. Maybe the author is writing from the Yearning for Zion Ranch, or is a member of one of those tribes that counts “one, two, many.” At least she didn’t say “literally countless.”

Along with the raw, blood-and-guts physical carnage of battle, what often gets minimized is the emotional devastation suffered by military families, whose loved ones have been torn violently from this world.

“Raw,” “blood-and-guts,” “physical,” “carnage” — this sentence manages through tautology to accomplish exactly what it decries.

From the same review:

At Kyle Burns’s funeral, his mother, Jo, was introduced to Terry Cooper, whose son Thomas had also been killed in Iraq. After briefly talking about their boys, Cooper concluded that both were probably hell-raisers growing up:

” ‘Was your son as big a little [expletive] as mine?’ she asked.

” ‘Yes!’ Jo Burns said, exploding with laughter and tears. ‘Oh, yes!’ “

All of these moments that Sheeler has so meticulously gathered act as a powerful counterpoint to the impersonal statistics and verbal camouflage of military euphemisms that sanitize the true horror of war and dehumanize those who serve.

I long for the day when the Washington Post discards the verbal camouflage of euphemisms that sanitize and dehumanize the people in their pages.

Conclusion: Yes, it’s me, and I am sick.

edit: Just remembered another one from this morning:

Shifting from his own family’s encounters with fate, for example, he notes that it is hard to imagine a world without Harry Potter, yet publishers rejected J.K. Rowling‘s manuscript nine times before someone finally said yes.

See, no it isn’t hard to imagine that. Being old, I can imagine all sorts of worlds: A world without iPods. A world without the space shuttle. A world without microwave ovens. A world without microwave popcorn. It’s not that I possess supernatural powers of imagination — I ACTUALLY LIVED IN THESE WORLDS.

/rant