Writers' News 2010

Alimentum contributors share their recent experiences at the literary table.

Michael Aleman | Amy Halloran | Eric LeMay | Angela Long | Sophie Menin
Peter Selgin | Maya Stein | Wally Swist

Angela Long had never heard of "off-the-grid" until she found herself living there. In a cedar-log cabin on a remote archipelago, she collects rainwater and fuels her laptop with windpower. Here, her first collection of poems emerged—the product of twenty years wandering through countries and cultures. From Chicacao to Varanasi, Milan to Haida Gwaii, Observations from Off-the-Grid explores life beyond conventional demarcations. Reader meets author as English teacher in war-torn Guatemala, meditation student in India. The collection gives voice to victims of torture, beggars, the homeless. It gives voice to the heartache of a Sunday afternoon.

Peter Selgin, Alimentum Editor and Co-Art Director, has a new blog. Free writing advice! Submit the first page of your book, story, or essay and Peter will critique it for free. Visit Your First Page to find out more. (And for news about Peter's new book, click here.)

This summer Sophie Menin has a multi-week series on The Daily Beast called A Hundred Summer Nights: A Global Celebration of the Summer Table. It explores two of the great impulses of summer: long leisurely meals with family and friends, and faraway voyages. Here's the first installment. Check it out and pass it on!

San Francisco poet Maya Stein has been writing an original 10-line poem once a week since June of 2005. Every week, she emails "10-line Tuesday" to a subscriber list of nearly 550. Later this summer, Maya will travel across the country to introduce herself to her readers, most of whom she's never met. In addition, Maya will offer free writing workshops and other events in the hopes of gathering 10-line poems from participants for an anthology to be published when she returns. "On the Road with 10-line Tuesday" will take Maya on a 6-week tour to big cities (Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, New York) and small towns such as Whitefish, Montana; Boone, North Carolina; and Peterborough, New Hampshire. She is using Kickstarter, a crowd-sourced fundraising site, to help finance the project. For more information, visit On the Road with 10-line Tuesday.

In June, Alimentum Web Editor, Eric LeMay released Immortal Milk: Adventures in Cheese, an engaging love letter to the food that Clifton Fadiman once called "milk’s leap toward immortality." Immortal Milk brings us cheese from as near the cheese shop around the corner to as far as the Slow Food International Cheese Festival in Bra, Italy. In the company of his best girl, Chuck, LeMay endures surly fromagers in Paris and dodges pissing goats in Vermont, a hurricane in Cambridge, and a dispiriting sense of hippie optimism in San Francisco; looks into curd and up at the cosmos; and even climbs a snow-encrusted, lynx-trodden mountain, to discover the mysteries of cheese. For more, visit the Immortal Milk website.

Michael Aleman’s poem, "The Interpreter's Hands," was published in the Penwood Review; plus two short stories have been published: Allies appears in SpokeWrite, and Adios Mi Abuela appears in The Acentos Review, on-line.

Amy Halloran is raising chickens! She provided a report and photos: "Here's some chicks, born on Sunday—Mothers Day phenom, for sure. The birds got broody, meaning they wouldn't leave the hen house, so we gave them fertilized eggs from a friend who has roosters. They sat and they sat and they sat for 21 days and three chicks hatched. There are still more eggs, but who knows if they will become chicks. Here's a couple of odd pictures—they are hard to catch." For more news on Amy and her family's adventures in the kitchen, visit her website.

Peter Selgin, Alimentum Editor and Co-Art Director, has a new book. Having trouble with your novel? Let this book be your guide. 179 Ways to Save a Novel condenses advice collected and collated from over a thousand critiques. Award-winning author Selgin's experience as an editor and a teacher will help you discover ideas for troubleshooting through insights gleaned from a life of reading, writing and loving literature. Guaranteed to challenge, inspire, provoke—and occasionally tickle or annoy, these meditations will awaken a deep awareness of the fiction writer's many challenges and thorny choices. For more about Peter Selgin, visit his website

Wally Swist’s scholarly monograph, entitled The Friendship of Two New England Poets, Robert Frost and Robert Francis: A Lecture Presented at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire, was published by The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009. Visit Wally Swist's website.

Visit our archive page for Writers' News 2009.