Ken Foster's Blog, page 3
April 20, 2014
On Maggie, Money and the blogger tip jar
For the past few years I've been writing a lot about death. And grief. And it hasn't been by choice really, although as I get older it does seem, in a way, that that is what this world is all about: figuring out how to deal with the fact that people are going to die before us and before we are ready to let them go. Last night, sitting in a bar with a friend I hadn't seen in ten years, we were talking about losing our parents, and how unprepared we are for it. My friend...
April 3, 2014
The Perez land grab in Holy Cross
In the coming weeks, New Orleans City Council will be deciding on the fate of the former Holy Cross school site for which the neighborhood is named. Perez APC has an agreement to purchase the property with the hopes of building a series of tall residential buildings along the river. Their first proposal was for 13 stories, the latest is for 7. Current zoning limits them to 40 feet, which is where the neighborhood would like to remain. Working with Tulane City Center, t...
April 1, 2014
Why I republished my first collection of short stories fourteen years after the first edition
The Kind I'm Likely to Get, 1999
The Kind I'm Likely to Get, 2013
Last year I was able to put out an ebook edition of my story collection The Kind I'm Likely to Get. Here's an extended version of my author's note from the ebook edition, with some of the backstory on the original publication as well as the how and why of how it fell quickly out of print and why I wanted to put it back in circulation. You can buy the ebook for 99 cents at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo an...
February 4, 2014
Charlotte's Web isn't a children's book
I'm getting ready to start teaching an online course on writing about animals and Charlotte's Web is at the top of the reading list. It may seem strange to have a book we all remember from childhood on a reading list that is meant as an example of the complexity of our relations to animals. Also on the list: the work of Vicki Hearne, essays from The New Yorker, My Dog Tulip, etc., all works that are ambiguous or even somewhat unsettling. In other words, they are real. But Ch...
Remembering Ellen Miller, still
My 20-year New Orleans anniversary got me thinking about other anniversaries, primarily this one: five years ago in December, my friend Ellen Miller died in a hospital in New York City. A unidentified Jane Doe after collapsing in a bodega. We had known each other for nearly twenty years. We met, briefly, in a writing workshop in New York City, and I knew as soon as I saw her that she was a junkie. Her skin was a yellow-gray and her demeanor so interior it surprised me...
January 24, 2014
New course: Writing About Animals
Everyone is doing it--but it is so easy to do badly! My latest online course is all about Writing About Animals--and we'll be reading about animals, too. When an editor first suggested that I write about my dog, I said no. The only dog books I knew at the time were schmaltzy and sentimental and I couldn't imagine writing something like that. But then I realized I could write something on my own terms--and also that sometimes schmaltz and sentiment aren't bad at all.
In my ne...
January 12, 2014
Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss
The final reading for my upcoming online essay course is the memoir The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison. When The Kiss was published over 15 years ago, it was just the beginning of the industry's obsession with memoir, particularly memoirs about obsession. Because of the subject matter, Kathryn Harrison's book had generated a lot of heat and outrage before publication, with the strongest opinions often coming from people who hadn't actually read the book. I had hosted a reading or...
January 8, 2014
My mixed feelings about David Sedaris
David Sedaris is hugely popular, so why don't I like him so much? And I why did I almost delete that sentence, because I felt like I was being mean to him? I first encountered his work way, way back when all he had done was appear on NPR and publish a slim collection of essays, or, more accurately, pieces. And perhaps the "piece" nature of his work is part of what makes me feel that I'm missing something. Is he funny? Hilarious. But does his humor reveal somethin...
January 7, 2014
Joseph Mitchell's Ear for New York
Essays should be personal, but what makes an essay personal is actually up for grabs. Sometimes it is the subject matter itself, which is the case in most "personal essays," where the author recounts in meaningful detail, an encounter or series of events that changed their life. For other writers, like Joan Didion or Luc Sante, it comes from their profound focus, which leaves readers feeling as if we have literally viewed the world through their eyes. But then there are writ...
January 5, 2014
Luc Sante: Kill All Your Darlings
I hadn't heard of Luc Sante until I began studying writing at Columbia that I heard of Luc Sante. I
hadn't really heard of anyone at that point and was remarkably under-read considering I wanted to be a writer. But he was teaching a seminar called "Evidence" that was supposed to be about writing as an act of presenting evidence, an expansion of his own book, Evidence, in which Sante paired old black and white crime photos with an essay on the nature of and interpretation of "evide...
hadn't really heard of anyone at that point and was remarkably under-read considering I wanted to be a writer. But he was teaching a seminar called "Evidence" that was supposed to be about writing as an act of presenting evidence, an expansion of his own book, Evidence, in which Sante paired old black and white crime photos with an essay on the nature of and interpretation of "evide...
