Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 11

Writer’s Desk: Write with Conviction and Humility

In a recent piece for the New Yorker that ranged from George Orwell’s Why I Write to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book The Message, Jay Caspian Kang grapples with a problem that can bedevil some of us who make words as a vocation: How much does our writing matter, and should it? Writers, dramatic and vain …

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Writer’s Desk: Residency in Red Wing

Near the town of Red Wing, Minnesota is the estate of Dr. Alexander Pierce Anderson, who made some millions by creating things like Quaker Puffed Wheat. Since 1995, the Anderson Center has hosted residencies for artists from around the world. It costs $30 to apply. Selected writers will have two- or four-week residences at the …

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TV Room: ‘Disclaimer’

My review of the new Apple TV series Disclaimer was just published at Slant Magazine: Alfonso Cuarón’s potboiler Disclaimer, an adaptation of the Renee Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, begins with famed documentarian Catherine (Cate Blanchett) being fêted at an awards ceremony. Scenes of Catherine and her husband, Roger (Sacha Baron Cohen), living a …

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Writer’s Desk: Do It, Don’t Talk About It

In her book Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, Carolyn See has a lot to say about how to survive and even thrive in the writing life. In part, she does this by keeping it simple. She includes practical asides about what will be demanded of you, though what she says …

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Screening Room: ‘Megalopolis’

Francis Ford Coppola’s bonkers “fable” about the clash of dreams and cynicism, Megalopolis, has a potent but unfounded belief in its importance.

Reader’s Corner: ‘Polostan’

Stephenson packs everything readers might want in their characters into one woman and lets her run with it.

Writer’s Desk: Epiphanies are Cheating

Novelist and writing professor Charles Baxter was reading a Best American Short Stories volume when he realized something: Every story seemed to end the same way: I kept coming upon final pages in which there was a moment when a character stopped and looked off into the distance, and then a sentence the equivalent of …

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Writer’s Desk: Look Outside

Anne McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern series) moved from America to Ireland, where she enjoyed, among other things, the “lovely vistas.” It’s not something that most writers can manage, of course. But she made a good point about the importance of having something to look at: I think writers need windows on a view to remind …

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Writer’s Desk: Design It Yourself

When J.D. Salinger saw the Signet paperback cover for his novel The Catcher in the Rye, with a very literal painting of Holden Caulfield wandering the sordid streets of New York, like many authors, he was displeased. Unlike many authors, he took matters in his own hand. One of the more famous of the book’s …

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Screening Room: ‘Elton John: Never Too Late’

The new documentary Elton John: Never Too Late just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. It should be coming relatively soon to Disney+. My review ran at The Playlist: The makers of “Elton John: Never Too Late” wisely didn’t try to be completists. After a half-century-plus of touring as well as recording approximately eleventy thousand albums …

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