Poet Cynthia Zarin writes hard truths with a soft voice, and for the first time she puts that same voice and poetic density into a book of prose. Out this month from Alfred A. Knopf, Zarin's memoir An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History is a series of essays about her life in New York: work, apartments, relationships -- all the normal things -- but written about from a rare place of fierce tenderness and self-awareness. I was caught up from the very first page of the book's first essay, "Real Estate," and by the time I'd finished it I knew I wanted to talk to Zarin about her book and her relationship to the city came to be. We spoke by phone.

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Free but still not quite exonerated, Damien Echols spent half his life in prison -- much on death row -- as punishment for a crime that he has never been linked to with, say, evidence. Many of those years he suffered in solitary confinement, even as the documentaries Paradise Lost and its sequels revealed this injustice to the world.

As he recounts in his new memoir, Life After Death, Echols taught himself meditation, the particulars of a host of religions, and even the one thing that might be truly unteachable: how to write well.

He credits his success with the latter to the years he's spent in the company of Stephen King. Echols has never met or communicated with King -- "I don't know that he knows my story," Echols says -- but it's possible that, after 18 years of incarceration, there's no other adult mind with whom Echols has spent more time. The Voice called Echols to ask about King's influence yesterday.

I heard an interview where you said you learned to write from reading Stephen King novels over and over in prison. You were actually reading these beforehand, too, right?
It goes back to when I was ten or eleven years old. My grandma got one of his books at a garage sale, and I want to say the first of his I ever read was Night Shift. I'm not 100 percent positive, but that's one of the earliest I remember. The reason it sticks out so much is the cover. It had a hand with a bunch of eyes looking out of it, all wrapped in gauze or a bandage. I thought, "What the hell is that?"

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In our concrete jungle, few species of humans are as ubiquitous and dangerous as WRITERS.

Not to be confused with writers, WRITERS are a breed best characterized by their habitat (over-priced speakeasies) and their method of stalking romantic prey ("I mean, I want to write a sitcom.") Though it is very likely you will encounter WRITERS in the wild -- say, scribbling in a Moleskine at Cafe Loup or dozing in your writing workshop -- do not approach WRITER.

They might appear charming -- seductively brooding, with an endless supply of backhanded compliments -- and might even offer to buy you a drink, but WRITERS are actually dangerous animals. As lovers, they are emotionally damaging and must be avoided at all costs.

So, here are 11 reasons why you should never fuck a WRITER:

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Alan Light

Ray Bradbury, 1975

Ray Bradbury, the author and sci-fi legend, died this morning in Los Angeles at the age of 91. Bradbury, who sold over eight million copies of his books, and wrote for television, film, and theater, received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2000, and the National Medal of Arts in 2004.

As Victoria Bekiempis reminds us, the author may not have been a great fan of the internet or the rise in ebooks, but he sure loved reading. A few days ago, squashed on the F train, I read his essay Take Me Home, about discovering the fictional character of Buck Rogers, and the work of Tarzan-creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, when he was a boy in Illinois. It was a wonderful reminder of how pulp and the low-brow can be great. And, at their best, inspire greatness. (And silliness, too! I was delighted when my colleague Robert Sietsema pointed me toward a campy, sci-fi commercial for prunes, starring Bradbury.)

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Maybe the aggregation turbine is broken?

Looks like HuffPo, the "internet newspaper," might soon become a term paper mill.

Huffington Post College tweeted late last night: "Want to publish your senior thesis on the Huffington Post? Email rharrington [at] huffingtonpost [dot] com for more details."

(H/T @mylestanzer, a former Voice intern who sometimes contributes to RS).

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Courtesy

Erin O'Brien, a member of the New York City NaNoWriMo group

They have overdosed on coffee, written on layovers in Canada, traveled from the Netherlands, put pen to pad on a packed tram headed to Roosevelt Island, and made time for writing even after dealing with a parent's heart attack.

They're New York City's NaNoWriMo participants, and no, they didn't do it for kicks.

The global writing initiative, also known as National Novel Writing Month, challenges participants to write a novel of at least 50,000 words during the month of November every year. Now that December is here, participants have collectively exhaled and some are even plotting to have their novels published--much to the dismay of critics.

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