Jess Wells's Blog
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Feb.03.2013
My empty-nester friends and I have started venturing out and I’ve christened us The Feral Parents Adventure Club. Here’s a faux marketing flyer for our group:
Welcome to the Feral Parents Adventure Club (FPAC), a group for empty nesters or those watching a last child grip the edge and attempt...
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Dec.14.2012
Marvelous piece by Silas House:
"We writers must learn how to become still in our heads, to achieve the sort of stillness that allows our senses to become heightened. The wonderful nonfiction writer Joyce Dyer refers to this as seeing like an animal… We writers must become multitaskers who can be...
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Dec.11.2012
Love it when science delivers a reason behind a craving, in this case my empty-nester’s new craving to pick up my purse and keys, throw on a black coat, and get out into the San Francisco night, to see young people out on dates, to go where the crowd is, to wander Valencia St. with no destination,...
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Nov.17.2012
I continually research information about the trades in the Middle Ages: how things were made, what crafts and activities took place in a village. Remember that in the Middle Ages the process of making things was intimately present in daily life; everyone had a specific craft, unlike today...
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Nov.14.2012
On the oddities of non-fiction:“…Such is the modern personal essay from the House of Ira Glass. It should be called something else, other than nonfiction. “Re-enactmention,” perhaps. Wherein a predominantly true story is made more complicated in the service of art. There’s gratuitous...
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Jul.04.2012
I’m struck by the recent book review of “How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection” and I’ve been puzzling over some questions it raises for writers.
First, the facts. The book “explains how a team of researchers at the Univ. of Memphis collaborated in...
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Mar.24.2012
Completed teaching another seminar on “Writing Historical Fiction” at the marvelous Writing Salon in San Francisco. My students invented lively and really insightful stories. Their favorite pieces of historical fiction were:
Blind Assassin – Atwood
The Known World
Kindred –...
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Oct.24.2011
As a mother of a son and writer, I am saddened, angered, ultimately frustrated by the situation regarding books for boys. Here’s are some gems from an excellent article by Robert Lipsyte, winner of a lifetime achievement award from the American Library Association for his contribution to...
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Oct.17.2011
The recent story of Bay Area writer Joe Quirk who is suing Sony Pictures and others over copyright infringement contains a number of disheartening facts:
“Even at (a) time when the value of intellectual property is perhaps higher than ever, with local technology companies including Google and Apple...
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Oct.10.2011
Lev Grossman has beautifully explained in a New York Times article what makes me uneasy about the eBook:
“…so far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: nonlinear reading.”
Starting in the first century A.D., Western readers discarded the...
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Sep.21.2011
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with willpower. As a writer I count on it to get me to the desk but as a non-conformist I rail over the Puritanical, judgmental tone that always seems to come with the advice to exert willpower over temptations. And as someone who constantly...
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Sep.15.2011
Discovered this eye-opening book by the Taschen company, makers of amazing art books: Cities of the World: 363 Engravings Revolutionize The View of the World which contains color plates of cities 1572 -1617. It’s a gold-mine for the historical novelist (or the dreamer who wants to fall...
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Jun.05.2011
The prosecution of animals – putting a pig on trial with its own lawyer, bringing criminals charges against a horde of flies – was a common practice in the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. Strange as it may seem to us, it was based on some fairly sound logic, according to Darren...
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May.29.2011
My remarks during a recent panel on historical fiction at the wonderful Saints and Sinners Festival:
I love historical fiction but it’s a recent appreciation and it was born of a reading of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind because it’s a historical setting but a modern novel form...
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Jan.06.2011
The Key West Literary Seminar for 2012 is entitled "Yet Another World" and will focus on creating alternate realities, or as they describe "To celebrate our 30th anniversary, we look to the unexpected, the unknown, to worlds that might have been, and worlds that may still come to...
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About Jess
Jess Wells is the author of 12 volumes, including the historical novel, A Slender Tether , coming soon from Fireship Press, and The Mandrake Broom (Firebrand, 2007). Wells was awarded a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant for Literature and she is a four-...
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Causes Jess Wells Supports
Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, Friends of the Urban Forest, The Heifer Project, Forests Forever, NRDC