“Fiction is dangerous, Gaiman explained, because “it lets you into others’ heads, it gives you empathy, and it shows you that the world doesn’t have to be like the one you live in.” That imaginative leap into other minds and other worlds is surely the reason many of us read fiction.” —
Why Neil Gaiman Thinks Fiction is Dangerous, and Why I Think Fiction is Dangerous
http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2013/06/prepub/why-neil-gaiman-thinks-fiction-is-dangerous-and-why-i-think-its-dangerous/
(via londonxbridge)
(via sweetnovellas)
A little editing humor, via writerly folks on Facebook.
So since the Sisterhood is my primary blogging gig these days, I thought I’d continue to highlight my favorite posts now and then on my Tumblr. Here are a few:
And be sure to read the Sisterhood on your new RSS reader: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/rss/
“A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity.
“Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.”
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Study: Reading Fiction Makes People Comfortable With Ambiguity
Hurray!
“His long legs were like girls sheathed to the neck in shining riding boots. He smiled at me, struck his riding whip on the table, and drew toward him an order that the Chief of Staff had just finished dictating.” —
I just returned from TENT: Creative Writing, a pilot program for young Jewish or Jewishly-inclined writers at the Yiddish Book Center. I have a lot of thoughts, but I’ll start with sharing an Isaac Babel story that became the touchstone story for my writing workshop with Ehud Hazvelet. See if it doesn’t break your heart a little, and say a lot about Jewishness without being explicitly Jewish.
Dear Jim, Scott, Graydon, Hugo, Josh, and Adam:
I hope you don’t mind that I’m calling you by your first names, even though I know only one of you. (Josh and I go way back.) I realize I could have just said, “Hey guys!” which, come to think of it, really makes my point for me. But I wanted this…