[.ca] Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times: A Collection ... (ISBN 0465078443)

Optimism about the "writing life":
Kevin Smokler was sick of hearing about the "death of publishing" for which the internet was supposedly responsible. So he went out and rounded up more than two dozen actual dead-tree writers to prove that it's just not true. The result is an enlightening and entertaining look at how a new generation of writers has come of age in the "digital" era. My favourites among the 24 essays include the one where Paul Collins reads through 121 years of the proto-blog "Notes and Queries", and the one where Neal Pollack discovers fan fiction written about himself. Also, the one where Nell Freudenberger talks about reading her short stories to students in China while reading her father's teenaged journals from his trip to Communist Yugoslavia and Hungary. And the one that alternately mocks and adores the Eggers/McSweeney's/Believer magazine cabal. Oh, yeah, and the one where Glen David Gold confesses to Googling himself obsessively. Meghan Daum's essay about the vocal tics of the NPR set was interesting (though it would have made more sense as a spoken word piece), and Pamela Ribon's tale of how she accidentally became a "real writer" kept me smiling and reading. There were a few dead spots, though, mostly the stuff about whether an MFA in Creative Writing was a useful detour or not. In fact, the pieces I liked the most had the least to do with writing as an academic subject. Overall, the book has a higher-than-average ratio of good essays to not-so-good. It will give you an idea of the current state of the "writing life" and will bring you optimism where you may have been feeling none. If anything, there is more writing (and more importantly, more publishing) going on than ever before in human history. The challenge to come will be to filter through all this information to find the writers that are truly gifted and to help them use these new tools to reach audiences that they never could have imagined in the last century. Kevin's book has shown that writers are finding a way. In fact, they are finding many ways, and that makes Bookmark Now an essential read. Even if it is printed on dead trees.