May 2013
14 posts
4 tags
The April Writing Group: Laundry, Escapes,...
In April, we welcomed new member Erum into the writing group, and us old-timers watched as, right before our eyes, it became her favorite night of the month, as well.
Other major changes in April included an extension of the allotted silent writing time (silent, but with wine!) from 30 to 45 minutes. You’ll notice a commensurate increase in average word count.
I hated my story right after...
2 tags
5 tags
A Story for All the NYC Bike Share Haters,...
Two summers ago, Mic and I met up in Paris — me from Berlin, her from a wedding in southern Germany — where we would kick off a couple weeks of traveling together. We spent a lot of time while there with Virginie, a native Parisian whom Mic knew from Virginie’s New York days. Virginie is a person whose life on paper reads like the treatment for some HBO punk-glamour make-good...
4 tags
This is one of the very few wooden clapboard houses left in Manhattan, on 29th Street at 3rd Avenue, probably built in the 18th century and existing along my walking route to the ferry terminal at 35th Street on the East River.
Its survival seems remarkable, its charm even more so, especially in the face of its across-the-street neighbor, the bar Tonic, which would be on anyone’s...
3 tags
Petition to Keep Rockaway Ferry
The Rockaway Ferry began service in the weeks after Hurricane Sandy, providing Rockaway residents with a means of getting to the city after the A train was wiped out. It’s awesome — forty or so minutes to downtown Manhattan, and you can buy coffee in the morning and beer later on.
The ferry is currently scheduled to cease service when the A train comes back at the end of the month...
1 tag
11:11pm and the Music Just Went Off
When you are spending your first night since January without at least one from among your boyfriend and your dog, you don’t feel lonely exactly, but sort of like the music just went off after playing in the background for hours. Everything is the same, even though it is suddenly a little off, and things that blended into the noise before are suddenly denuded.
On a normal night at this...
5 tags
Novels I Should Have Read Decades Ago: The Bell...
The particular topic of conversation last week between Ebeth and me isn’t relevant, which is lucky because I can’t remember what it was. But I know that we sat at the end of a red-lit bar sipping the first cocktails of what would turn out to be a longish run of them, and for a reason that seemed to matter I told her that I didn’t like The Bell Jar. I immediately revised my statement, professing...
5 tags
Daily Beast, Monthly Reviewer
My first go-round as a regular book reviewer for The Daily Beast is up (I wrote the last two in the series this week). Look for me again next month!
Above is an accurate visual dipiction of a day in my life.
1 tag
3 tags
I'm Writing a Book! Holy Shit, I Have to Write a...
Walking home from Soho yesterday, where I treated myself to a haircut I can’t afford from the magic-making Mariano at Ion, it came to me that in observation of my celebratory mood, I would, if I came across an appropriate bar on the way back to the apartment, stop for a drink by myself to have a moment over my book deal.
By appropriate, I mean empty and possessing a capable bartender. I came...
4 tags
Biggest Announcement of My Whole Life: I'm Writing...
It is with so much happiness (and a healthy amount of stress, now that the reality of a manuscript deadline is part of my life) that I announce that I have sold my book, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, to Amazon Publishing.
And because this is Amazon Publishing, the recently launched publishing arm of Amazon, there will be some experimentation — namely, the book will be...
4 tags
4 tags
3 tags
A Day in the Hospital Waiting Room
I had every intention of writing a lot more while at the hospital yesterday waiting for a friend to come out of surgery (she did good!). In the end, this is all I’ve got, plus some post-traumatic stress from all the blood I saw:
Bored people in the waiting room, some with their heads leaning against the wall above their chair backs, eyes closed. Like everywhere, but especially like in an...
April 2013
19 posts
4 tags
So pleased to learn that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors and its director, Sam Fleischner, who I profiled for Storyboard (RIP) last month, won the Special Jury Mention for Narrative Feature at the Tribeca FIlm Festival. There’s nothing better than good things happening to talented people who are also nice people.
Go see this movie!
1 tag
2 tags
2 tags
Howard Dean Did WHAT??
Last night I dreamt that I got tricked into attending an event held by a cult that had torn down S. Jam Fitzgerald’s elementary school and built a Branch-Davidian-like compound in its place. When the cult decided that in order to be taken seriously, it needed to sacrifice Howard Dean, who was present, I decided to wake up. [[MORE]]
I shuffled in bed, too selfish to endure dead-of-night waking...
3 tags
5 tags
Surreal-like large-scale sculpture by Anish Kapoor at a sculpture park in New Zealand called Gibbs Farm. Strangely, I think I would love it even more if the image above were only a painting.
Kapoor incidentally is the same artist who made The Bean in Chicago (officially named Cloud Gate), which we have all photographed our reflections in, if we have been there:
6 tags
Three Brief Reviews of Things I’ve Experienced...
Without further ado:
Room 237
If you’re going to make a movie about people’s obsessions, of any sort, you should probably have a plan in place to synthesize those obsessions into some kind of story. You should have a plan for whittling their frame-by-frame analyses of ski posters, windows, paper trays on desks, chairs in the background, imaginary floor plans, brands of typewriters, into...
7 tags
Mistaking the New York Bridges
Love both of these accounts of mistaking one New York bridge for another, written more than three decades apart:[[MORE]]
From Joan Didion’s “Goodbye To All That”:
All I could do during those [first] three days [in New York] was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could...
3 tags
6 tags
We Hate Hipsters, but Why?
Love this piece by Evan Hughes in Utne Reader (originally Tin House) questioning the enthusiastic spite aimed at hipsters in Brooklyn:
Has anyone articulated what is so wrong with carrying canvas bags, eating organic, doing yoga, and trying to limit environmental damage? And do we have to be embarrassed if we take pleasure in a pluralistic and creative place?
It’s something we should...
5 tags
Taking in Spring (right before this weird weather...
It’s the yellow of the daffodils more than anything that brings me to attention, where they’re blooming in the square patches of dirt surrounding Gramercy Park. It’s the yellow, more than the buds on the trees or the winter coats ceding to unbuttoned cardigans or the wide-open windows in the apartment, that carries the craven promise of spring. It’s the yellow that I stare at and stare at...
2 tags
I Made a Real Homepage
I decided recently that I was long overdue for a more professional website, where editors and fans (?) can learn about me and see all my published writing in one place.
The result: Sarah Stodola’s Writer Page.
It’s a work in progress, but I hope everyone finds it charming and useful nonetheless.
2 tags
5 tags
Umbrellas, Matches, and the Limitations of...
There are inventions, items, objects of nouns, that haven’t been improved upon in hundreds or thousands of years, since their inception: matches, for instance; umbrellas, for another. Things technology can’t replace. Your Twitter will never build a fire. Your iPhone will never shield the rain.
Those are two of my favorite items, matches and umbrellas, for their simple practicality,...
2 tags
Why is it I must feel embarrassed about the one...
I really love author Christine Schutt’s response to the question of what she likes least about being a writer. To paraphrase: It sucks telling people you’re a writer.
People ask if you’re a writer, and you say yes. Discomfort ensues. And then:
Would I know your name is the last question, and what is there to say but probably not?
This coming from a woman who has been...
6 tags
March Writing Group: The One I Almost Sabotaged
I love my writing group, so it was with panicky horror that I received a text from Sacha at 7:30pm or so the night of our March get-together asking where the hell was I, only politely, which is the only way Sacha knows. I responded that I’d be there at 8pm, right? She said, it started at seven. I said oh shiiiiiiizzzzzzz, and then I still got there at five minutes after eight.
I think the...
1 tag
3 tags
Nothing on the internet is really all that important. That article about “Girls” will probably be there tomorrow and the next day. The internet is forever! And Lena Dunham didn’t get to where she is today by reading dumb shit on the internet and making dumb jokes on Twitter. She makes dumb jokes on HBO. And now people care about her dumb jokes on Twitter. What the hell are you...
5 tags
My Three-Day Weekend in Trinidad
The Wall Street Journal sent me to Trinidad for a travel story — I loved that place, most especially for its complete lack of interest in white tourists. And the hike along the northern coast, plus dinner at Coco’s Hut after, was a highlight of my entire travel career.
Take Monday Off: Trinidad (The Wall Street Journal)
March 2013
20 posts
4 tags
5 tags
Having a Child Has Definitely Not Been a...
This whole interview on The Hairpin with Jonny Diamond, who just left his position as editor of the L Magazine and Brooklyn Magazine and has a great name, made me feel a lot, with its missives about quitting a job that is sort of in the ballpark of what you want to be doing, but due to that proximity actually reveals itself to be so far away from what you really want to be doing.
I liked the...
4 tags
Sylvia Smith and Making the Prosaic Interesting
Sylvia Smith was not a writer I’d ever heard of when the New York Times published her obituary earlier this month, but the brief description of her career in the headline – “Writer of the Life Banal” – compelled me to first read the obituary and later to purchase the only book of hers that seems to be currently in print, Appleby House.
Writing about the “life banal” has always struck me as the...
3 tags
4 tags
3 tags
Keeping Yacha in my lap in the dog run to protect her from this, which was rampant:
Bonus shot: The post-dog run fist bump…
(photos courtesy of Merna)
4 tags
Lena Dunham Stole My Dog, Career
During our search for a rescue-able, grey, scraggly, 10-pound dog in January, S. Jam Fitzgerald and I stopped by the BARC Shelter in Williamsburg one evening. We visited a dog named Velvet, who was awesome but ultimately five pounds too big (she found a home, don’t worry, we checked on that). When I described exactly what we were looking for to the guy running the show at BARC, he said, “Lena...
4 tags
2 tags
Oh, World:
Lululemon said late Monday it had recalled batches of its stretchy black signature yoga pants because of an unacceptable “level of sheerness” created during the manufacturing process. Shares of Lululemon fell 4.6 percent
4 tags
2 tags
Yacha: Still a Girl, No Longer a Woman
This morning we picked all seven pounds of our Yacha up from the animal hospital, minus her lady parts. She was terrified and groggy and her face was oily and she wore a lampshade around her neck. It was the saddest sight I’ve ever seen, aside from that sight yesterday when I dropped her off and the surgical assistant carried her off to the back rooms of the animal hospital, Yacha wearing...
5 tags
5 tags
5 tags
4 tags
I Finally Know What's Wrong with "Girls"
How 21st century that I finally located the essential flaw of Girls in the comments section of a piece of satire. In a piece on College Humor, writer Mike Trapp cleverly applied all criticisms of Girls to the show Seinfeld — the narcissistic characters, the all-white characters, the fact that nothing ever actually happens, the schlubby people getting to bang really hot people, the...
7 tags
I Am Writing This Blog Post for Free
I’m sure by now every freelance writer in America has read the post by Nate Thayer documenting his exchange with an editor at The Atlantic, who asked him to write 1,200 words for free. It looked completely familiar to me. Examples: I’ve let the Huffington Post, against every fiber of my being, reprint materials for free that I’ve written for other publications; The New York Times...
