About Lisa Birk
A graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator, Lisa Birk was formerly a teacher of writing at Boston University and the project manager of Harvard University’s Narrative Journalism Program at the Nieman Foundation. Her work has appeared in many publications including Orion Magazine, the Harvard Review, The Boston Phoenix and The Boston Sunday Globe. It has also been anthologized in several books including W.W. Norton’s Abnormal Psychology. She is seeking representation for two novels, The Rehabilitation of Maria LaHaye and Chipped.
There is nothing I detest more than tooting my own horn. Blame it on my ancestors, who would rather die than be caught being so jack-all-full-of-yourself as to sit down across from an agent to sell your work. The work, I…
So you have a strategy or two for locating the reader in time. You know whether and why you’re setting your surreal, speculative or dystopian novel in the past, present or future. And you’ve pinpointed the era, the decade, maybe…
From Hogwarts to Whoville every fiction writer constructs a world. It’s an artful business even when the settings are based on real places. The best ones are indelible.
Let us suppose that an era comes, an era of undetermined length, where words come unmoored from meaning. A word like “compassionate” say. No problem. Easy enough to hang onto the definition: To be compassionate is to both understand and…
We are in tumultuous times and it is easy to dismiss art, music, writing, maybe particularly writing fiction, as a luxury. I think it is anything but.
The pace of change emanating from Washington, D.C., has many of us reaching for books—whether to escape, learn, resist or a little of each–Dead Darlings is here to help.