Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 11
August 11, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Be Afraid of the Fear
At some point it gets easier. Eventually you have written enough that the panic and indecision just disappears. At that point, the words flow like fine wine. Isn’t that how it works? Not necessarily. Consider Rita Dove. A Pulitzer-winning poet and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, she was also the U.S. Poet Laureate from …
August 8, 2024
Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘The Writer’s Year 2025’ on Sale Now
As mentioned a few weeks back, I decided it was time to put all these writing tips and quotes into printed form. Fortunately, the good folks at Workman Publishing agreed. That is why as of this week, you can now get your very own copy of The Writer’s Year: 365 Days of Inspiration, Prompts, and …
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August 4, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Love, Luck, and Endurance
James Baldwin’s one hundredth birthday was this week. Here is what Baldwin said about what makes a writer successful: Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. So what does it take? Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
July 28, 2024
Writer’s Desk: How Do Ordinary Humans Sound?
Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the great crime writers, was once asked by a man how she wrote such realistic dialogue between male characters. Did she have a big family or a lot of male friends? Her answer was to the point: I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my …
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July 27, 2024
Screening Room: ‘War Game’
I reviewed the new documentary War Game for Slant: Much of the criticism thrown at Alex Garland’s Civil War centered on it presenting the titular conflict without really explaining its origins. Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’s documentary War Game goes the other way by showing in very specific ways not how a modern-day American civil war might be fought …
July 21, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Imagine Your Reader
When asked by The Paris Review to describe the ideal reader of his works, Anthony Burgess came up with a highly specific characterization: The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my …
July 19, 2024
Reader’s Corner: ‘American Gothic’
I wrote about the exhibition and book “American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson” for Rain Taxi Review of Books: Like many great collaborations, the iconic partnership of Gordon Parks and Ella Watson was an accident. In 1942, only a couple of years after the Kansas-born and Minnesota-seasoned Parks had left the Twin Cities, he …
July 15, 2024
Reader’s Corner: Charles Burns and ‘Final Cut’
I interviewed cartoonist Charles Burns (Black Hole) about his new graphic novel Final Cut and the creative block that led up to it for Publishers Weekly: Whenever he tried to start a new project, it fizzled out. “I went for months and years,” Burns, 68, says via phone from Philadelphia. “This is shit,” he remembers …
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July 14, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Read Somebody Better
Kathryn Schulz writes in the New Yorker about “all the other options” of coping when stuck on a piece of writing: …ignoring the problem, staring blankly at the problem, moving the problem around to see if it’s less annoying in some other location, eating all the chocolate in the house… Then she delivers this crucial …
July 8, 2024
Screening Room: ‘Made in England’
My review of the new documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger ran in Slant: Given the sense of wonder and promotion of emotion over reason that courses through Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s work, it’s appropriate that David Hinton’s Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger starts with a recollection of …
