Listen up!

As some of you know, I like listening to books on tape and other audio materials while I knit, drive, clean the house...pretty much anytime I can't actually be reading but my mind can focus on a story.

I started a new little area on the blog where I can keep links to some of my favorite sites for audio materials. See "Listen up!" on the left. Let me know if you have any favorites that aren't listed, or if you like any of the ones I have listed.

More audio, an update

I've been a bad blogger. Mostly because I haven't had much to say. I do have some pictures to share, but that whole plugging-the-camera-into-the-computer thing seems like something I just don't have the time for.

So instead, I bring you a link to Harvard Book Store's Audio page, where you can hear authors like Steven King, Barbara Kingsolver, and Richard Russo read and discuss their work. (I'm going to see Charles Baxter speak there tonight. Hopefully they'll put the audio of that up at some point.) Another good literary thing to listen to while I knit!

And as my blog title promised, I also bring you this update: I'm still plugging away at revising Northern Exile (the second of the five stories I'm revising this semester for my thesis). It's going a little slower than I'd like, but it's moving. I decided I will send it to Advisor on Friday No Matter What, so hopefully a firm deadline will get my little fingers moving.

I've been doing morning pages (journaling) and that has really helped me work through some of the problems in each of my stories. I highly recommend freewriting about the issues you're having in your poems/stories/novel/essays. It seems a little odd that writing about your writing might help, but it really does! Something about writing in a journal (ie not having the problematic work staring you in the face) releases enough pressure for your brain to work out whatever needs to be fixed.

Need to be read to?

As some of you know, I like to listen to books on tape, NPR, and things of that nature while I knit. I thought I'd share two writing-related audio features I just learned about:

1. The New Yorker has published free audio clips of authors reading their favorite short stories and discussing them with the fiction editor of the magazine. So far, I've listed to Jhumpa Lahiri reading/discussing William Trevor's A Day, and boy was it worth the 45 minutes! I learned a lot about the story, which I had read already. Go to itunes.com and search for New Yorker. The fiction should be easy to find.

2. Salon.com recently featured Billy Collins in its Video Dog feature. Click here to watch him talk about poetry and the writing process in general.