Jane Smiley | Jane Smiley
Jun.21.2011
At the recent Iowa Writers' Workshop 75th anniversary celebration, the concluding session was titled "The Writer as Public Figure." I went with great expectations, silly me, looking forward to an interesting discussion on, I dunno, maybe the writer as "public intellectual?" You...
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Sep.24.2010
I've been blessed in many ways. I do something for a living that I love--and sometimes it puts me in the company of some pretty fantastic people.
This past week I spent time with four wonderful women. Although we'd never met face-to-face, two of them--Jane Smiley (Private Life) and Eileen Goudge...
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May.08.2010
My review of Jane Smiley's newest novel, Private Life. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/02/RVDL1D42CR.DTL
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Oct.20.2009
There's not a whole lot Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley and I have in common. There's that prize, for one thing. She's extraordinarily tall, I'm extraordinarily short. Even our names are of wildly different lengths - I've got her whole 10-digit name beat with my hyphenated last name...
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Jun.19.2009
Dear Reader,
Responses to my most recent post have me feeling like a whiner, even though my intention was to talk about how reading can inspire a writer. Lest I be accused of ingratitude, let me pass along the remarkable, fabulous highlights of my life since the controversy over THE JEWEL OF MEDINA...
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Apr.29.2009
My wife, Ann Pibel, ever the fantastic researcher, found that the Festival of Books panel, "About Reading," which I wrote about earlier this week, was shot by C-SPAN. You can see the sixty-minute discussion at http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info...
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Apr.27.2009
The air was as clear as aquavit, blue sky over a green Los Angeles, thanks to the winter rains. A cleansing and cool breeze of sixty-eight degrees blew all day, which made for a perfect time to be outdoors at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
The weekend event, spread across UCLA's city of a...
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Oct.01.2008
Okay, I stole this title from Barbara Sher (the Wishcraft lady), who has a book entitled I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was. I am about to usher myself and a passel of writers and hopefuls through the process of planning and writing and revising a novel.
In October, we will plot and...
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