Oldest Female Debut Novelist Tells All
I’d been warned by my editor. She told me that as an older author I might have trouble finding an agent. She knew a Canadian agent who prided himself on never taking on a debut novelist over the age of 45.
Latest Entries
Grief Wakes Me Early: A Letter From a Literary Conference
By Lorelei Goulding I sit up in bed after a bad night’s sleep, trying to keep my sniffling quiet. My roommate sleeps across from me, in a cap and socks. She gets cold at night, even in the summer. I have noticed that she has trouble falling asleep too, and maybe that is why they … Continue reading
Bloom Creative Writing: Speaking Ill of the Dead
These days, I only come to the café alone. I do not lie to myself about what this café means. I know it is simply a familiar shell into which, like the hermit crab that I have become, I scurry, knowing full well it is a home borrowed from someone else’s past. Continue reading
An Excerpt from Joan Frank’s essay collection, Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading
Joel Agee, author of The Stone World, said of Joan Frank’s essay collection, “Late Work is one of the best books on writing and the writing life I have ever read….It is above all a book about art and the role, both tempering and freeing, that aging plays in an artist’s life and work.” Continue reading
From Wall Street to the Writer’s Life
Anne Elliott talks to Bloom about transitions: from financial analyst to fiction writer, from New York to Maine, from wanting the writing life to living it. Leah De Forest: You’ve been writing a long time. Can we go back and talk about what your life was like, say, twenty or thirty years ago? Anne Elliott: … Continue reading
Bloom Creative Writing: Four Poems by Jack Stewart
We never get snow,
Even when winter is fully here,
Just a jacket of emptiness
Buttoned by nuthatches. Continue reading
The art of doing your own thing
“There’s a moment where artists start doing what they do. A good example is Rothko: his early work doesn’t look like Rothko. But then all of a sudden everything looks like a Rothko. I feel like that’s probably true of a lot of writers … at some point maybe you settle into the kind of … Continue reading
Dancing with the Muse in Old Age: A Profile of Priscilla Long
by Alice Lowe
At 79, she proudly claims and defends the word “old.” Further, there are no such things as “senior moments”; we all, at any age, forget where we left our keys or glasses now and then. Continue reading
Bloom 