In this week’s Roundup, we’re playing a game of quotable contributors! In this game, everybody wins. From envy to Donald Trump to marriage, Ecotone and Lookout authors are talking about all sorts of things on the Internet this week. Here are our favorite morsels to challenge and inspire you.
Ecotone contributor Molly Antopol has a conversation with Sophie McManus over at Pixelated. Sophie asks how Molly gets inside her character’s heads and she says, “It’s much easier for me to write about the things I’m really upset about, terrified of, etc. when I can look at them through the lens of someone very different from myself. Basically my sweet spot in writing is cranky, middle-aged Jewish men. But nothing in writing comes easily for me, unfortunately! These stories took FOREVER.”
Ecotone contributor John Jeremiah Sullivan has a conversation over at Chapter 16 with Susannah Felts. Asked about if the topics and people he’s written about in the past pop back of for him, he replies: “All subjects come back, both to haunt and to goad you. The best ones do it the most. That’s one of the ways you recognize them. By best, I mean the subjects that trouble you in a deep enough way to sustain you.”
Ecotone contributor Sarah Manguso takes on envy in her author’s note in the New York Times. Smartly putting things in perspective, she says, “The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison.”
Lookout author Steve Almond, always ready with the most helpful advice, has some hilarious tips in the Boston Globe for talking to your kids when they inevitably bring up Donald Trump. “Remember that your child has not yet learned to draw a clear line between fantasy and reality. She may not understand the difference between the monsters encountered in fairytales and the bloated, orange-faced creature bellowing polls numbers at her on the television.”
Ecotone contributor Delaney Nolan has a story up on Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading. Here’s one of the characters on his marriage: “Natalie and I used to fight a lot, before. Regular marriage fights—I pretend to laugh too often; she criticizes me too much. I wouldn’t say we had issues, but we’d gotten married in our twenties, and after two decades together even our thinnest problems had had time to accumulate into thicker, heavier ones, like stacks of plastic transparencies that eventually stop being transparent. But when the sand started to come up and cover everything and everybody, the fighting sort of died off.”
We hope these quotables have given you something to think about, and we hope your week ahead is filled with all sorts of inspiration things you can’t wait to write down. Oh, and if you’re looking for more inspiration, don’t forget to follow Ecotone (@ecotonemagazine) and Lookout (@lookoutbooksuncw) on Instagram!