Barnes and Noble Reading Adventure + One Teen Story News – L’s review

We gotta big post comin’ up right here:

The One Teen Story website is up and running! I can’t wait until September when the first issue comes out.

A week or so ago, Isabel, Laila and I went to a reading at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. There were two guests, Emma Straub, who has written the short story collection Other People We Married, and Stephin Merritt, of the band The Magnetic Fields.

It was a fun event, made even more fun because it took place on a Thursday night (scandalous with school the next day!) and because the weather was so lovely that I was able to walk home from Union square.

The beginning beginning very beginning of a piece inspired by (obviously) my walk home and the strange and wonderful things you encounter on a NYC street at night.

During the event while Emma Straub was speaking, I jotted down what struck me as interesting or good advice for aspiring writers.

• A short story is about a moment – one feeling. A novel can be about many moments and feelings put together to create a broader picture but a short story has better success when it is specific instead of attempting to create the arc of a novel in twenty pages.
• Short stories can “leave you on the brink”. You can simply end a short story without coming to a clear resolution. In a novel, however, after 100s of pages, a reader wants a clean (unless there is a sequel in the works) ending.
• RESEARCH! Writing is all about research. And research doesn’t necessarily have to be boring either…hey spending a week in Rome for “research purposes” doesn’t sound too bad….
• And a little something that Emma said she does: center short stories around specific places you’ve travelled to and the funny/interesting/unusual things you discover there.

The evening also had a lot of air time devoted to Stephin Merritt. He answered questions about his work and performed songs. His songs were quite funny…unusual…I’d say (to use a boring word that doesn’t quite sum them up). Because I have little to no interest in song writing methods nor is his “genre” of music what I tend to listen to etc. etc. I didn’t enjoy that part as much as I enjoyed Emma Straub’s moment in the spotlight.

AND! Something I just discovered while googling her…she is a staff writer for Rookie! Which is very cool.

Isabel knows her and they work together at Book Court so hopefully we have an interview or something of that sort coming up in the near future.

Happy reading xoL

Upstairs at the Square with Emma Straub! – I’s review

Last week, Lydia, another friend and I went to a reading at the Union Square Barnes & Noble by Emma Straub.  Also present was musician Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields, a band that Emma does design work for.  I volunteer at a bookstore in Brooklyn called Bookcourt (hey look, the Cindy Sherman book is a new release!  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this) a couple of days a week and I met Emma through that.  She wrote an amazing book of short stories called Other People We Married last year, which was recently rereleased (!) so she read a few excerpts from different stories and Stephin sang a few songs from the band’s new album, Love at the bottom of the sea, including:

(It’s an… interesting video) and

I bought the whole album on itunes as soon as I got home (highly recommended) and some of my other favorites are “The Horrible Party” and “I’d Go Anywhere With Hugh.”  You can watch the entire reading here on the Barnes & Noble website. But don’t buy the book from Barnes & Noble; buy it from Bookcourt (or your local, independent bookstore)!!!  Also, check out Emma’s blog and The Magnetic Fields tour blog for some good reads, or better yet, buy tickets to one of their many concerts this month!

Happy Reading and listening,

I