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Donald Barthelme would’ve been, and should be, eighty-three today. It would be an exaggeration to say that I feel the absence of someone whom I never met—someone who died when I was three—but I do wonder, with something more than mere curiosity, what Barthelme would have made of the past twenty-odd years. These are decades I feel we’ve processed less acutely because he wasn’t there to fictionalize them: their surreal political flareups, their new technologies, their various zeitgeists and intellectual fads and dumb advertisements. Part of what I love about Barthelme’s stories is the way they traffic in cultural commentary without losing their intimacy, their humanity. But I’m losing the thread. I wanted to say something about lists. A zombie advances toward a group of thin blooming daughters and describes, with many motions of his hands and arms, the breakfasts they may expect in a zombie home. The list is the ideal vehicle here. Related: About Writing

Review 31 Home | Review 31 The Los Angeles Review of Books ReadySteadyBook - for literature... The Rumpus.net The Allen Ginsberg Project The Awl - Be Less Stupid David Foster Wallace on Writing, Self-Improvement, and How We Become Who We Are by Maria Popova “Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. In late 1999, David Foster Wallace — poignant contemplator of death and redemption, tragic prophet of the meaning of life, champion of intelligent entertainment, admonisher against blind ambition, advocate of true leadership — called the office of the prolific writer-about-writing Bryan A. Over the course of the exchange, the two struck up a friendship and began an ongoing correspondence, culminating in Garner’s extensive interview with Wallace, conducted on February 3, 2006, in Los Angeles — the kind of conversation that reveals as much about its subject matter, in this case writing and language, as it does about the inner workings of its subject’s psyche. Wallace begins at the beginning, responding to Garner’s request to define good writing: In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Donating = Loving

Poets & Writers | Contests, MFA Programs, Agents & Grants for Writers The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily Routine Reflecting on the ritualization of creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that “air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.” Samuel Johnson similarly contended that “a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” And yet some of history’s most successful and prolific writers were women and men of religious daily routines and odd creative rituals. (Even Buk himself ended up sticking to a peculiar daily routine.) Such strategies, it turns out, may be psychologically sound and cognitively fruitful. [There is] evidence that environments, schedules, and rituals restructure the writing process and amplify performance… The principles of memory retrieval suggest that certain practices should amplify performance. Kellogg reviews a vast body of research to extract a few notable findings. The lack of interruption in trains of thought may be the critical ingredient in an environment that enables creative flow.