Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- September 8, 2017 Edition

> Need to scan old, perhaps not-great-condition photos for a writing project? Google has a new app that looks as if it might be the answer. I'm itching to try, and wish I'd known about it a few months ago when scanning pics for my forthcoming memoir. (h/t Simplemost)

> I loved this essay at the Woven Tale Press, in which Beth Kephart draws writing inspiration and insight from the painter Andrew Wyeth. (Well, of course I love it. I've admired Beth's writing for 20 years, and thanks to my own inspiration--via friend and writing supporter Christina Baker Kline (whose latest novel was inspired by Wyeth's most  famous subject) -- I visited Wyeth's Cushing, Maine painting base this summer).

> Congrats to the new "Debs" -- five authors, from different genres, whose books will all debut in 2018, and who will be taking readers along for the ride via frequent blog posts at The Debutante Ball. 

> Excellent tips for aspiring op-ed writers, from columnist Bret Stephens at The New York Times.

> Finally, buying your way onto the bestseller lists. And getting caught. Here's the long, gossipy, tweet-laden, multiply-updated story. And the shorter, concise version of how the New York Times reacted.

Have a great weekend!   (And if you happen to be spending it at the Hippocamp Conference for Creative Nonfiction Writers, please do say hi!)

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons

Writers, Photos, Fear, and Me: Getting Back in the Picture

Perhaps you already know that about 7 weeks ago, after avoiding it for seven years, I finally had a new photo taken for professional use (there it is, at left!). I told the story about how I got over my photo fear in my Thanksgiving newsletter, and mentioned it on Facebook. 

What happened next surprised, intrigued, and in some ways saddened me: within hours, more than 50 individual emails, and dozens of Facebook comments from other (mostly female) writers, all described feeling the same dread of posing for a new photo. Clearly, we all needed a reality check.

Then in December, SheWrites, the wonderful web community, invited me to share the story, which includes this excerpt: 

...Recently, when asked for photos to accompany essays from my memoir manuscript, about the relationship I formed with my father after he died, I persuaded each editor that something else would be more interesting--me and Dad on my wedding day; him holding me as a toddler; an image of Las Vegas (where he'd retired).   

But I was delaying the inevitable. A month ago, an editor of a print magazine insisted. She suggested I stand in front of a leafy tree and snap a selfie, and while that appealed to my budget (one son in college, another heading that way), I knew I needed help to get camera-ready, a village, and that costs. Photography sitting fee. Make-up artist. A decent  haircut, coloring, style. Then, paying for the actual images.  

Then there were the emotional costs: Age, more weight gain, a neglected appearance, and a bitterness that a writer's physical appearance mattered. That my story might be judged, maybe before the words are even read, based on the size of my chins, my age, the fleshy contour of my cheeks, the width of my nose, the wrinkles around and the bags under my eyes. What did any of that have to do with the words, story, with writing?   

But pictures do tell stories. And the one I joked I'd use until I was 90, suddenly struck me as telling the wrong story. That woman no longer exists, in ways that please and pain me... 

You can read the full post over at SheWrites. I'd love it if you would chime in, either here in comments, or over there, with your own thoughts on the subject. Are you getting in the picture?

Guest Blogger Vanessa Wright on An Unexpected Journey: The Writer’s Winding Path

One of the pleasures of having one's work included in an essay anthology is the connection to the other contributors. If you're lucky, you find an entire new group of like-minded writers, expanding your writing community. This has happened, happily, for me several times, and that is precisely how Vanessa Wright and I found one another – as contributors to Why We Ride: Women Writers on the Horses in Their Lives, published by Seal Press last May. Vanessa's artistry is expressed in many ways – as a photographer, writer and teacher, whose work "celebrates the human-equine bond."

Please welcome Vanessa Wright.

Particularly in October, any leaf in New Hampshire will tell you: inspiration can be a dangerous thing. For as long as you can remember, you have been clinging to the same tree: dancing in the wind, glowing in the sunlight, and growing into the lines and arcs of your unique and perfect shape. Life is warm and good. The days always grow longer, and the world grows full.

Then comes the tingling, the cool breeze that riffles the newest, tenderest, and greenest edges of everything that you are. Like laughter between lovers, it is the secret that can never be told, the call not to your heart but to your clear, swift-running blood that cries, “Become!” Become what? “Shh. Let go.” How? Why? And what will happen? No answer comes, except a harvest all crimson and gold, a shortening of days, and a brisk, northerly certainty that change is in the wind.


I was a writer once. I researched and wrote thousands of words each week: fiction, nonfiction, instructional text, history, literature, nature, myth. I was fearless and, thus, full of stories. Fairy tales and lesson plans dropped into my hands, ripe and plump as strawberries; the grand dance of nations, inventions, and ideas twirled itself out in chapters among the wildflowers as my horse and I lolled in his pasture.


I could have lived in that summer country forever. But those silver fingers brushed my drowsing eyelids; that golden bell shattered the dam holding back the clear river from my veins. A strange and terrible story coursed through me – a story unlike anything I’d written, a story of glowering skies and trees turned to flame. Summer turned to autumn in a moment, and that blissful pasture withered beneath my feet.

For a thousand reasons as complex and common as the lace on an aspen leaf, I could not write it. That story, it was not who I was – it was not the fairy tale I wanted it to be. My own heart failing me, I leaned upon the one heart that never had: my horse’s.

The stories came – and went to print – quickly. “Rope Trick,” an essay about my horse’s near-magical abilities to make food appear and disappear, was published in Dr. Marty Becker’s Ultimate Horse Lover. “Under the Wings of Pegasus” tells the true story of my horse's midlife calling to become a foal-sitter for rescued, orphaned and challenged young horses, and opens Allen and Linda Anderson’s Horses with a Mission: Extraordinary True Stories of Equine Service. Of course, “Great Grand-Mare,” the mane-raising tale of his sprint with my 92-year-old grandmother, appears in Verna Dreisbach’s Why We Ride.

Yet writing about my horse produced results I did not expect. My focus turned from the past to the present moment, from the world to here. I realized that legendary horses and their people – Pegasus and Bellerophon, Greyfell and Siegfried, even the Pie and Velvet Brown – had their equals in compassion, courage, and heroism in my own horse and in the lives of those he touched, and those who touched him.

I decided then to travel, across America and around the world, collecting the stories of today’s heroic horses and horse-people, novices and Olympians alike. I photographed them and paired the photos and bios with quotations from classic books. I offered the collection to libraries, and added educational materials I created drawing upon my experience as a teacher of history and literature and as a director and manager of a children’s theater program. Before I knew it, it had become The Literary Horse: When Legends Come to Life, an exhibit touring public and school libraries worldwide through 2012.

More than 150,000 children, teens, and adults have visited The Literary Horse exhibit since its debut in May 2008. It has appeared at libraries to celebrate national and international events ranging from Children’s Book Week to the World Equestrian Games, and it has trotted into the pages of national media outlets including EQUUS, The Blood-Horse, Horses in Art, and HorseChannel.com.

Though I have walked a winding path, not only am I still a writer, I am more of a writer than I was before. The kindness and generosity of the equestrians and horses of The Literary Horse were my harvest of crimson and gold. Learning of their journeys beneath glowering skies and through trees turned to flame, reminded me that all days are short, and that change is how we meet each moment – that it is a blaze and a leap to be embraced. Simply walking among them inspired me to become, and to let go. And that story I could not - would not - write began to write itself.

So, like any leaf in New Hampshire, I too will tell you that inspiration is a dangerous thing: follow it, and you may become more than you ever dreamed you could be.

To learn more about Vanessa Wright's The Literary Horse: When Legends Come to Life, which pairs photos of today’s novice through Olympic horses and riders with quotations from the world’s great books, visit the website. Vanessa also recently started the blog Great Books for Horse Lovers.

One Writer's Holiday Haul

In the spirit of it being a week in which not much real work will get done, I'll simply ask if you got (or treated yourself to) anything this holiday which will make your life as a writer easier, or just more fun? I did:

-An inexpensive, simple-to-use digital camera of my own (meaning it won't always be in my husband's office just when I need it, or in my 10-year-old's hands, or at the bottom of the camping bag, or the dashboard of the car).

- An oversized calendar titled, The Reading Woman, featuring gorgeous images of paintings of a woman alone reading. They are mostly carefully attired and coiffed women in period dress and lush surroundings, although I must say my favorite is At a Book, by Maria Konstantinova Bashkirtseva (Ukrainian, 1860-1884), in which a grey-haired woman dressed in plain black is at a table, her head bent over, ample hand splayed across her forehead and hairline. I guess I like it best because it's how I picture myself, me and something to read, alone, in any simple setting, shielding out the world. (Except that my grey hair is Medium Brown #43). With online calendars, I suppose I don't really need this, but my office walls always have a place for inspiration.

- A book about Latin for word geeks, Carpe Diem by Harry Mount, which I requested, since my teenager is studying Latin (and scoring 98s), and I'm convinced that if I knew more about Latin words, I'd have a better writing vocabulary. Plus, I'm one of those odd people (otherwise known as writers) who like reading about words.

- Paper. Green paper. Rectangular-shaped. With two-digit numbers on it. Every writer always needs more paper, especially that kind. Thanks, Mom.

As a show of support for the print media industry, I gave subscriptions, but since my husband made it clear that war would ensue if one more magazine or literary journal arrived in our own mailbox, this was probably the first year no one gave me one in return. He doesn't really need to know about the ones I get shipped to a friend's address now does he?

Hope you got something nice too.

Blog Break: Read This Instead.

Hi folks. I have been, and continue to be, busy taking care of one very important small person at home for the past week or so, leaving little time or mental energy to blog. I'll be back soon as all is once again humming along as usual. Meanwhile, I did get time to sort through a bunch of piled-up magazines in between making chicken soup, pediatrician runs and Monopoly. Here's a fascinating article from The New Yorker which made me rethink everything I thought I knew about photo retouching.