Vermont Writers Blog

A Tribute To Grace Paley, Vermont Poet Laureate and NWU member

2007-08-25T17:02:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, August 22nd, Grace Paley died at her home in Thetford, Vermont
after a long battle with breast cancer. Grace, one of the country's outstanding short story writers and poets, was also a human rights activist and strong supporter of the labor movement and writers' rights. Small wonder that she happily served as an NWU Advisory Board member and spoke on several occasions at our Vermont chapter's annual meeting.

Last year, we asked if she would agree to our establishing a Grace Paley Fund for Vermont Writers. With the kindness, warmth and genuine enthusiasm she always showed to other writers, she graciously accepted -- even while admitting that she was somewhat embarrassed! She never let her designation as Vermont's poet laureate to go to her head. As she met with Vermonters all over the state -- in libraries, schools, and social gatherings, she was down to earth and modest to the end.

You can find more about the Grace Paley Fund here. Although the NWU administers the fund, it is open to applications from all low income Vermont writers who need some financial assistance for their writing projects.

Obituaries in The New York Times and The Washington Post are fitting tributes to Grace's creative skills. (Additional obituaries can be found, among others, at Democracy Now and maudnewton.com; Grace's last major interview was with the Los Angeles Times in June.)

We will miss Grace terribly, and offer the Union's sincerest condolences to her husband Bob Nichols and her family.

John Caruso Wins a Prize

2006-10-21T13:14:00.000-07:00

My friend John, who lives and writes in the midst of his amazing gardens-in-progress in Braintree, won Amazon's short-story contest this summer. The prize includes making his story, "The Art of Finding", available for purchase on amazon.com (for a nifty 49 cents). At that price everyone can read it. It's an excellent piece of work, and I feel only a twinge of envy. (The reviews are also uniformly positive, even if I do wonder a bit whether some of the reviewers read the same story I did.)

Better yet, John gets a shade under 20 cents for every copy of the story that people download. That's not much less than some publishers offer for a whole paperback novel. (When the contract first came in, John was a little scared, because it uses words like "exclusive" and "perpetuity" and phrases like "all media." Some of his fellow NWU-VT members kicked the text around for a while and decided that it really wasn't so bad -- although Amazon keeps the right to sell the story on its site indefinitely, John can sell rights to other publishers after the story has been at Amazon for six months.)

It's events like this that occasionally restore my faith in the business of writing. Even today a good writer without a large body of published work can win a contest, make some money, and impress other writers. Now if only someone who's impressed by "The Art of Finding" wants to publish a really big first novel...

Editors sure are funny

2006-08-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

(And when I was an editor I thought the same thing about freelancers.) I've never been very good at predicting which proposals my editors will like. The ideas I think are really neat, or maybe even Important, they tend to think are weird or boring or overly arcane. The ones I think are just okay, or cute throwaways, they latch onto. So of my last four pitches, two from conscientious trolling of the internet for new ideas, one from a random conversation at a picnic, one based on headaches I was having with a new cell phone, which do you think got picked up? Better yet, when I pointed out to an editor that the reason he gave for shooting down one of the other proposals wasn't accurate, he decided he still didn't like it. Of course, I'm thrilled to be doing the pieces that editors did like, and I'm pretty sure I'll find something eventually for the holdout, or he'll find something for me.

The most useful lesson to come out of this latest round of proposals: the value of gentle persistence. I didn't hear anything about one of the "throwaway" proposals for about a month, and figured that it had met a deserved end in the editor's bit bucket. Turned out he'd been busy (imagine that!), the article had seemed to conflict with another one in the publication's pipeline, and so the proposal had slipped his mind until I brought it up again. Now all I have to do is the reporting and writing...

Vermont Writers Meet

2006-08-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

At left, members of the Vermont Chapter of the National Writers Union meet for their annual meeting at the home of Rickey Gard Diamond and Stephen McArthur in Berlin, Vermont on Saturday, August 12. Writers from all over Vermont attended, including Robin Lloyd and NWU national President Gerry Colby.

A steering committee was elected and the new Grace Paley Fund effort was announced (see the announcement in this blog).

Also announced at the meeting was the beginning of this Vermont Writers blog, open for submission from all members of the Vermont chapter, as well as for comment and viewing by the general public. We hope it becomes a successful and effective place for writers to share their ideas, problems, and successes.

The Grace Paley Fund for Vermont Writers

2006-08-12T16:17:00.000-07:00

Being a writer anywhere is a lousy way to get rich. Being a writer in Vermont -- where local publications offer frugal payment, and doing national work often requires expensive travel -- is just that much harder. Even writers who take second or third jobs to support their creative vocation can find it more difficult to support themselves here.

The Grace Paley Fund, created under the auspices of the National Writers Union Vermont chapter, is intended to make the writing life a little easier for low-income writers in the state. Small grants for travel, photocopying, educational and other expenses will make it possible for writers to complete projects that could otherwise be just beyond their reach. (Consider, for example, the cost of a dozen or more copies --now required by most literary agents before they'll represent a book-- of a manuscript that might run to 400 pages or more.) Removing such barriers to participation in the marketplace of ideas will ultimately benefit us all.

For more information about applying for a grant from the fund, or about making a tax-deductible contribution, please send email to paleyfund@nwu-vt.org .

Why Andrea Sachs Needs a Union

2006-07-20T18:13:00.000-07:00

Click on the link here to find out why Andrea Sachs needs a union.

This was suggested by Paul Wallich and is a piece by Ezra Klein in The American Prospect about the character, in the movie The Devil Wears Prada, played by Anne Hathaway. Klein's basic point is that the character, Andrea Sachs, would not have been treated so abusively had she been a member of a union.

Submitted by Stephen McArthur