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.
We are awash in narrative. It arrives on every platform in ever-shorter form. (A Little Life not withstanding.) Which has me wondering, who has the time to dwell in a Brontë moor? And what’s the pay off? Setting: A History…
Some weeks before my artist friend Vicki Paret’s baby arrived, she stretched nine canvases of equal size. She gridded nine rectangles on each canvas. Eighty-one rectangles would form one epic painting. She worked methodically, left to right, top to bottom….
Consider the Comic where what’s not on the page is as important as what is. So says comic artist and writer Scott McCloud in his deceptively simple book, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.
Bad juju comes to most of us, and sometimes it comes all at once and sometimes it is a staccato of bad news, one thing, another thing, another thing, another. My response to trouble used to be assume professional stance at…
Perhaps you have heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Perhaps, you are not snarky and you have not thought derisively, Oh yeah, 30 days to write a novel, that’ll be real high quality. Camp NaNoWriMo, is lesser known, less…
How Not to Write I used to keep a book on my shelf to remind myself how not to write. The book, call it Stricken, consisted of a collection of essays on the author’s recent widowhood. She had written it perhaps…