Drash Pit

15/07/2014

South African Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, an unwavering moralist who became one of the most powerful voices against the injustice of apartheid, has died at the age of 90, her family said on Monday.

06/07/2014

Thanks, Lisa. DP likes this.

I want my books to get banned, and so far it's not working out. I've tried. I swear I have. When you write a book series called THE ORIGINAL SINNERS that follows the erotic adventures of a do******ix who is sleeping with a Catholic priest (when she's...

17/06/2014

The postwar literary landscape has been dominated by the male giants of American letters. So where are all the women? Elaine Showalter chooses the best novelists writing in the US today

05/05/2014

 What if you could discover the optimal blend of art, life and livelihood? What if you could create a life in the arts, as Jennifer Chenoweth put it, “attuned to the animal that you are”?     The Mother’s Day Retreat will include guided meditation, writing exercises, and time for reflection in order…

04/05/2014

Why do traditional paper books remain so popular, especially for deep, immersive reading? Are some people simply too stubborn and nostalgic to adapt to new technologies? Perhaps it's because paper books are themselves a highly sophisticated technology, one that's uniquely good at stimulating focus a…

14/03/2014

Wow! I have no words...
*Shay*

13/03/2014

How not to write this funny oh, so spot on piece.
Let someone else to it.

You’ve been planning to write that novel forever and yet you still haven’t done it. But you are determined, and if you’re not careful you might ac...

06/02/2014

It is time once again to present the annual Perpetual Folly Pushcart Prize Rankings for Literary Magazines. I’ll be rolling these out over the next three days, beginning with the Fiction ranking, w...

13/01/2014

Proud to have been his student and pleased to count him among one of my most charming friends. All the best to Jim and his new book.

James Magnuson, director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, has written a new novel about a con man, a famous author and some elements his Austin students might find familiar.

23/12/2013

For several months, I have been meaning to most a note on the Drash Pit site explaining why I suspended publishing for the time being and how I hope this page will become a new forum for those who wish to share their words, images, sounds and abundant creativity with this audience and with the larger one I believe we can make happen by posting, liking, linking, pinning and tweeting our work and the work of others. Go to www.drashpit.com to read more about it.

11/12/2013

We asked Saunders how he starts writing something new. “Well, I don’t do it by willing it.”

17/10/2013

Going but not leaving us in the lurch. . .

Effective Monday, November 11th, the WriteByNight writing center will close and its proprietors will relocate out of state.

17/10/2013

The joke, if you don't get it, is that in an older Philip Roth novels, The Counterlife, (one of my absolute favorites) Roth's "characters are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate."

Philip Roth, whose brilliant, humorous, often feverish inquiries into Jewish identity, politics, s*x, and culture turned him into America's most celebrated author, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Mr. Roth, 80, t...

16/10/2013

Oh well, there goes the 'age gives you experience' line we've assuaged ourselves with so often. Meanwhile, the book sounds great.

Ms. Catton was awarded the British literary prize for “The Luminaries,” an epic, 848-page tale set in 19th-century New Zealand.

13/10/2013

American Short Fiction was founded in Austin, TX, in 1991 by Laura Furman (editor of the O'Henry Prize Story Collections) and has published stories that have found their way into most of the big, y...

11/10/2013

Lit Crawl Austin is a collaboration between the Texas Book Festival and the Litquake Foundation. Inspired by the San Francisco literary festival Litquake’s long-running Lit Crawl (and produced with Litquake’s participation), the Lit Crawl features some of America’s most groundbreaking and beloved wr...

11/10/2013

Austin crazy fun for us lit lovers.

09/10/2013

The Mayor’s Book Club is an annual citywide reading campaign to develop a community experience through reading and discussion of shared books. Additionally, the program’s goal is to broaden and deepen an appreciation of literature in the Austin community, to increase the visibility of the Austin Pub...

09/10/2013

Enjoyed this review of Drasher Marion Winik's latest, "Highs in The Low Fifties." Bet you will too.

Writer Marion Winik has ridiculously bad taste in men. She's an intelligent woman and a terrific writer, a good mom with a good heart, and ALL of her romantic relationships are train wrecks.

06/10/2013

Congratulations to Jill & Callie, to Kelly Luce and to Joe Gross who keeps on writing about the good ones.

In Kelly Luce’s debut short story collection, “Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail,” a toaster lets you know when you are going to die, a young woman struggles with the death of a sibling and things get quietly, Twilight Zoney odd.

04/10/2013

Denise Prince was a Drash Pit featured cover artist in February 2012. Her work is breathtaking and powerful. Take a minute, view this video and look at the notice Denise is
receiving from philosophers and academics. As well, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston added a photograph from this series to their collection. Congratulations, Denise.

Matt Zoller Seitz editor in chief of Roger Ebert.com
You're so talented, and your empathy elevates you beyond artists who might have comparable technical chops. Everything you do has such singular spirit.

Marie Walshe Appi, psychoanalyst
You have captured something here of a notion I have been playing with over the last few months: the skin as ever-renewing psychic and physical container; the ego as a constantly evolving narrative, renewing past and future contexts; the resilience of the human subject in times of trauma.
I have been considering the necessity for the human subject OF trauma, as a constitutive psychological element, building resilience, developing self-awareness, challenging imaginary dependencies and fantastical deceptions.

Ian Grey
This is McQueen level. The idea, of course, is that.. fashion *should* do this when it's functioning at in its highest register. I thought your work was this value system working at the highest pitch one could hope for mixed with a gorgeous humanism you couldn't imagine until you actually saw it.

Robert Buck, artist
Thank you for this. Provocative, unsettling, and perhaps not in the ways you, the artist, intends, which is the case always as Duchamp taught, the "art coefficient", the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.I too think art should step further than any knowledge we have about it, to even create anxiety.

Dr Mehmet Candas, The University of Texas at Dallas, Molecular and Cell Biology
THIS IS POWERFUL! I think you managed reflecting the human beauty and grace by dissolving the uneasy layers of perception and comforting biased interpretation. Most importantly, your approach in this work demonstrates that "emphasis" on portraying of human subject can be diminished, or perhaps even erased, making the perceptual experience free from constraints.
REALLY NICE WORK, CONGRATULATIONS!

Denise Prince's unofficial advertising campaign for the Italian fashion house, Missoni.

29/08/2013

This is an excellent, and often surprising, portrait of an amazing artist. What a fascinating and brilliant curmudgeon. Warning: don't go into this with preconceived notions about Woodstock Joni. She picks on technology, western medicine, feminism, Dylan, Plath and us. She even forgets T.S. Eliot's name. What fun.

In advance of the Joni Mitchell Luminato Tribute Concert the legendary singer and artist sat down with Q host Jian Ghomeshi at …

26/08/2013

The power of your first story.

15/08/2013

21/07/2013

Join WriteByNight and the O. Henry Museum for a three-hour boot camp for writers of short fiction hosted by consultant, coach, and instructor Cecily Sailer.

17/07/2013

REDEEMED!

After years of emphasis being put on math and engineering degrees, here's why English majors may be in high demand.

27/06/2013

Behold what is either the best or worst rejection letter we have ever seen (depending on your capacity for cruelty), sent to Gertrude Stein in 1912 by publisher Arthur C. Fifield. Given that the manuscript in question became “Three Lives” (among other things) we suppose she had the last laugh.

http://tpr.ly/19xTpUQ

26/06/2013

It just seems like the right time to rerun this essay I wrote a while back. Enjoy it and celebrate the day. Neena

http://www.drashpit.com/Main/Revoked.html

sacrifice of heteros*xual privilege.”Though she underscored the drama of our upcoming forfeiture with stern brows and a buyer beware eye-lock, a touch of elation electrified me. Dizzying thoughts

24/06/2013

Looks great and it's this coming weekend.

30/05/2013

Aren't you curious to see what Drash Pit's Spring/Summer contributors did with a prompt like 'crumbs.' Check it out. There are delicious morsels of mental exertion within.

As crumbling ‘crumbs’ was our prompt for this issue we directed our intrepid contributors to find their own path in our shred of an idea. Of course, they did. And they did it beautifully. In case you haven’t heard, DP is taking a siesta until September. See you in Sept. when ‘hope’ is our prompt and...

26/05/2013

Would so be there if we could.

Here are 5 topics we'll cover in the Read Well, Write Better Workshop on June 1: How to Create a Unique Narrative Voice How to Write Dialogue as a Dual How to Write Dialogue as the Voice of a Commu...

26/05/2013

The Spring/Summer Drash Pit is up and ready for your perusal. The work of recently departed artist, Jimmy Jalapeeno, is reviewed inside and the outside cover boasts one of our favorites paintings - Jimmy's vivid rendering of Barton Springs. A scene that makes you want to pull on your suit and head for cool, sublime dip only the Springs can offer. http://www.drashpit.com/Main/Drash_Pit.html

12/05/2013

Mucho congrats to John Taliaferro. He gave this writer a forum for some of her first and favorite pieces published in a long ago magazine by the name of Third Coast.

If you saw Steven Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln,” you saw John Hay.Played by the young actor Joseph Cross, Hay was one of Lincoln’s two private secretaries (the other was John George Nicolay, played by Jeremy Strong.

08/05/2013

How could Austin ever pick just one?

A rapidly growing list of cities and towns across the nation have their own official bards.

01/05/2013

Great teacher. Great blog for writers. Highly recommended.

Have a story idea kicking around in your head? Or maybe you’ve written a few pages but run into a wall? Get read to jump-start your story with this energizing fiction workshop. Whether you’re an ex...