The Writer's News

Reprinted from the February 2008 issue of the Writer's Chronicle.

$3.3 Million Bequest to Southern Methodist University (SMU) Dr. Laurence Perrine, an English Professor at SMU, died at the age of 80 in 1995. Royalties from his classic textbooks, Sound and Sense and Story and Structure—which were first published in the 1950s and then became the most influential works in American education- continued to add to the estate of his wife Chathrine. Mrs. Perrine, before she died last year, honored his association with the university by bequeathing $3.3 million to the English Department at SMU. According the the Dallas Morning News, The Laurence and Catherine Perrine Endowed Chair in English to support a faculty position specializing in creative writing will be established for $1.5 million. $1 million will be used to establish the Laurence and Catherine Perrine Endowed President’s Scholarship Fund for at least two President’s Scholarships for students of Dedman College. The remainder of the Perrine bequest will establish the Perrine Endowed University Scholarship Fund to provide scholarships for English majors, who will be known as Perrine Scholars in English. Dr. Perrine originally wrote Sound and Sense for his SMU poetry class.

NEA Awards Writers More than $1 Million

Publishers Weekly Online reports that the National Endowment for the Arts will award $20.2 million to fund 908 grants. The Arts Endowment will distribute most of the money during FY 2008 to nonprofit national, regional, state, and local organizations across the country through the NEA’s Access to Artistic Excellence category. Additionally, it will award 42 creative writing fellowships to individual writers totaling more than $1 million. The literature fellowships recognize prose writers, encouraging the production of new work by affording them the time and means to write. Out of more than 700 applications, the NEA chose 42 literature fellows, who will each receive a $25,000 award. Among the writers who received awards are Nona Caspers, winner of AWP’s 2005 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (Heaver Than Air, UMass Press, 2006), Courtney A. Brkic (The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), Ravi Howard (Like Trees Walking, Amistad, 2007) and Tara Ison (The List, Scribner, 2007).

Options for Archiving Library Collections

Though libraries recognize the benefits of digitizing public domain books for online archives, they have hit a fork in the road. Starting in 2004, Google began its archival program wherein libraries can have their collections scanned at no cost to them. The company makes no direct profit from the archives; however, the content does become part of its extensive search engine, and they can then control the distribution rights to the material. Google expects to scan more than 15 million books from libraries such as the New York Public Library, Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. A noncommercial alternative is the new Open Content Alliance, a project of the Internet Archive which wants to grant universal access to library collections. Even though it costs as much as $30 a book, more than 80 libraries and research institutions- including the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian- have signed on to the O.C.A. project thus far. The Library of Congress appears to be trying both roads out, with both a pilot program planned through Google and its first mass digitization project through O.C.A. Despite joining the O.C.A in 2005 with its own archival project, Microsoft now prohibits inclusion of its books in any commercial search engine other than its own, but the material can still be accessed freely for academic purposes. Many members of the academic and nonprofit communities recognize the benefits of universal access and keeping one company from controlling the knowledge. Others are more attracted to being able to reach more people directly through well-known search engines, and being able to digitize collections without having to devote resources and grant money to the projects. Which of these two roads will become the one more-traveled remains to be seen.

The British Library Acquires Harold Pinter’s Works

According to Times Online, the British Library has acquired thousands of manuscripts, scrapbooks, and letters- most of them unpublished- that made up the personal archives of Britain’s renowned dramatist and Nobel Laureate. Pinter was determined that his papers would not leave Britain after the hue and cry about losing historic archives to America, most notably those of Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate, and John Fowles, the novelist. British universities cannot match the large sums that American institutions can afford, as a result the works of many British authors, including J. M. Barrie, Graham Greene, D.H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh, are held abroad. The Times Online article lists some notable collections that have left British shores for the United States of America:

• Salman Rushdie sold his personal archive, including diaries written during the decade that he spent in hiding from Islamic extremists, to Emory University in Atlanta for an undisclosed sum.
• Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate, sent his archive to Emory University for about £500,000.
• Julian Barnes, the author of Flaubert’s Parrot, reportedly sold his papers to the University of Texas at Austin for $200,000.
• Arnold Wesker, best known for his plays Roots and Chips with Everything, sold three tons of letters, manuscripts, and papers to the Texas university.

Nobel Laureate Lambasts the Web

The New Zeland Herald reports that, Doris Lessing, too ill to attend the Nobel Awards Ceremony in Stockholm, had her publisher read her speech to the attendees. She lambasted the web for the “dumbing-down effect” it is having on society. “How are we, our minds, going to change with the new Internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc,” asked Lessing. “We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.” Critics of the speech think that though Lessing has a point, she is more likely showing her age in not understanding the web. Lessing referred to a trip she made to Zimbabwe where she found classrooms without books, or an atlas, or a map on the wall. Teachers there begged for books. She sees a waste of talent in such third world countries, where there are no publishers to recognize new voices. On the flip side of this argument, it is through the Internet that new voices can be heard through blogs and self-published works. The Internet can empower millions, bridging the so-called digital divide by disseminating literature, a point, the newspaper claims, that Lessing misses.

W00t is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2007

An interjection, the double “o” in the word is usually represented by double zeroes. The exclamation is also known to be an acronym for “we owned the other team”- stemming from the gaming community. Merriam-Webster’s #1 Word of the Year for 2007 was based on votes from visitors to their website, who “chose a small word that packs a pretty big punch.” This word hasn’t found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet- but its inclusion in their online Open Dictionary, along with the top honors it’s now been awarded- might improve its chances. This year’s winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t (“leet,” or “elite”) speak- an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. The other nine words in the top ten list are: facebook, conundrum, quixotic, blamestorm, sardoodledom, apathetic, Pecksniffian, hypocrite, and charlatan.

Writers on Strike

On November 5, 2007, The Writer’s Guild of America went on strike after three months of failed negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. At the heart of the matter are the issues of doubled DVD residuals, union jurisdiction over animation and reality program writers, and compensation for “new media” including shows available on the Internet and video-on-demand distribution services. As of December, several attempts at negotiations have broken down, causing problems for those in the industry forced to choose one side of the picket line or the other. The strike had an immediate effect upon shows written and broadcasted daily, such as late night talk shows. Once networks run all currently written and filmed episodes of their regular shows, they will feel the pressure as well and be forced to either renegotiate, or consider more reality shows as solutions. Writer’s Guild of America West president, Patric M. Verrone, issued the following statement:

In recent years, these conglomerates have enjoyed tremendous financial success off the backs of literally tens of thousands of people––including members of the creative community.  Our part of that community is the writers, whose work serves as the blueprint for programs and movies. And although the industry’s pie is continually growing, our share continues to shrink… this is not an action that anyone takes lightly.  But it slowly became apparent that the studios are not prepared to deal fairly with writers and the rest of the talent community.  The companies have refused to agree that writers must receive fair compensation when the writers’ work is broadcast on the Internet or downloaded on iPods and cell phones.  The companies are seeking to take advantage of new technology to drastically reduce the residual income that sustains middle class writers and keeps them in business.  Their proposals would destroy the very pool of creative talent that is the basis of their immense revenues and profits.

December 2007 News

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February 2008 Issue