Andrew Wille

Thanks, Jude! Slow reading - I’ve been doing it with a few books this year. Also rereading.

andrewwillewritingstudio on Instagram: "The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong was not, initially, what I expected. It has a different shape and a different pace from dear…" The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong was not, initially, what I expected. It has a different shape and a different pace from dearly beloved and much adored On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I registered that this required a different approach in my reading. I let myself read it slowly, over a few months. It’s lyrical but also more episodic - more like a soap opera, I realised, or a Dickensian drama in how it presents characters and what happens in their everyday lives in the setting of a post-industrial town in Connecticut.We meet our protagonist Hai at a moment of crisis. He’s negotiating tough realities of economics and addiction and the immigrant experience and war and more. He finds purpose in working two jobs - in food service and as a carer. The book eschews the usual conventions of plotting towards a tidy ending. Instead we engage, carrier bag style, with Hai’s finding of found family. His colleagues and the elderly widow Grazina bring love and lessons and also laughter into the story. Themes of care and service are paramount: compassion and the idea of leading a good life. While I was reading I read a vile review (clickbait) and also snark on Substack. I felt this mostly spoke to reviewers and also Substack’s platforming of show-offs. A young and immensely talented and thoughtful writer clearly presses buttons for the less talented and thoughtless (or maybe just: the boring). I also felt the use of quotations in certain reviews was selective and wrong-headed. The very metaphors that distressed pantywaist critics are the very figures of speech that I love to arrest me in Ocean’s writing.These are matters of taste, rather than scorn. I also watched a review by more enthusiastic young reviewer @jackbenedwards who called this a ‘sentimental novel’. I liked that. I liked that that young reviewers as well as Ocean have no shame about sentiment and sentimentality - about feeling in writing. I saw Ocean at the Southbank recently, and he has so much intelligence to give.Anyway, I myself enjoyed this novel very much indeed. Many tender and funny and heartfelt moments along the way, and a beautiful last chapter.#bookstagram #theemperorofgladness

I don't know the author or the book he speaks of, but I was struck, & deeply so, by @andrewwille.bsky.social's thoughtful & poetic review of Ocean Vuong's THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS. (Comforting, too, how he sees reading a book oh-so-slowly as its own reward.)

📚💙

www.instagram.com/p/DPLRTn6iP-...

10 Unbelievable Ways To Cook With Nasturtiums  - Sow ʼn Sow Have you got an abundance of nasturtiums growing in your garden? Discover 10 ways you can cook with nasturtiums using the flowers, leaves and seeds.

Ooo must try that. Have quite a lot coming this year. Lots of leaves so far and by chance just this morning I found this:

sownsow.com/10-unbelieva...

I want to try the mini quiches.

So glad the gift just keeps on giving!

And thank you for taking us back! 😘

YouTube video by Alexandra Hidalgo Return to Naropa University 20 Years After Graduating

If you're interested in what #education can look like when it's blended with #creativity, meditation, #yoga, and dreaming of a more compassionate future, this video about Naropa University is for you! #WritingCommunity #TeamRhetoric #highereducation #AcademicSky

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxUE...

Voice A Zoom Masterclass Monday 10 February 2025, 7pm–8.30pm London time, £50 Trusting your natural speaking voice Finding your voice is one of the great myths of writing: you already have a voice. This …

And I’m talking more about trusting your voice in my Voice masterclass on Zoom on Monday.

wille.org/voice

Variations on the Form of I Remember: Voice 3 Writing experiment

One of my favourite writing experiments and forms of writing: I Remember. A great one for trusting (rather then finding) your voice.

open.substack.com/pub/andrewwi...

Unsolicited writing advice, no. #766: Writing is a community. Participate in it if you can. Engage with other writers. Lift them up, and they’ll do the same. Try to go it alone, or treat other writers as rivals, and you’re more likely to sink than swim.

I think the world needs Cozy Academia! Plus musicals of course 🎭👩🏻‍🏫💃🏻

Retired librarian here. There’s another thing you can do: put a hold on the book once it appears in the online catalog (yes, even when it’s still on order). Many libraries have a policy of purchasing additional copies when the reserves-to-copies ratio exceeds a specified point (say 5-1).

If you want to read a new book coming out but don't want to buy it, a great thing you can do is ask your local library to order it. The more requests they get, the more likely they are to acquire it and then lots of people will get to read it who othewise wouldn't.

So many things waiting to be heard. Today:
‘I know I’m not happy. I know I’m not happy. I know I’m not happy because my body tells me I’m not happy.’
All simply and powerfully put.

And the repetition was emphatic. It made me think how writing is often scared to repeat itself.

Overheard Dialogue: Voice 1 Writing experiment

Find your voice? How about finding other people’s?
Overheard dialogue is such a great exercise in writing.

Ernest Hemingway: the first draft of anything is shit. Natalie Goldberg tells writers to write the worst crap in America. Vomit drafts. Anne Lamott: be free to write Shitty First Drafts.
I don’t like all this ordure! Call them exploratory drafts or discovery drafts.

Emily Dickinson Podcast Episode · Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast · 29/06/2022 · 44m

Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast on Emily Dickinson

Richard Charkin: Exchanging Books With His Barber Richard Charkin discovers that his barber from Türkiye is a writer whose translator is a retired electrical engineer…

So many of the best and most valuable stories in publishing are ones like this that take place at the fringes or in alternative spaces

publishingperspectives.com/2025/01/rich...

I fear there is deep truth here.

What about Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Library Journal?
I have questions about things that don’t fit the pigeonholes or noise generators of influencer programmes or social media fashions.
(Sorry. I am OLD. I worked as an editor in house in another century 🦕)

You should tell the author of the article!
I had heard of her, and her work has been publicised in the trade press.
Am curious: where do influencers find out about forthcoming titles?

Magicians and Fools A Zoom workshop, Sunday 2 February, 5pm-6pm London, £30 First Steps Into the Major Arcana Let the Fool and the Magician be our guides to the big themes and archetypes that the cards of the Major Ar…

I’m starting a new series of creative writing workshops on Tarot For Writers, starting on 2 February with Magicians and Fools.

wille.org/classes/taro...

Art in the Age of Slop On Romantasy plagiarism, hashtag books, and why originality is still worth striving for

Insightful piece on publishing by influence and algorithm, and the slop that results.

I know! What a way to start 2025 - hard one to follow. It came along after a spate of underwhelming summer reads too so I felt most appreciative.
And to read that quickly and be consumed by it (I was). So layered and so much happening in such a short span.

The image is from a "Transparency Center" document and lists guidelines regarding acceptable and prohibited content for insults. It mentions: 1. Insults about: Character, such as cowardice, dishonesty, criminality, and sexual promiscuity or immorality. Mental characteristics, including but not limited to accusations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, as well as unsupported comparisons among politically correct (PC) groups based on inherent intellectual traits. 2. Highlighted section: The document allows allegations of mental illness or abnormality when tied to gender or sexual orientation, referencing political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality. It also acknowledges the non-serious use of terms like "weird."

Meta literally created a LGBTQ exception for calling someone mentally ill as an insult. You can't do it for any other group except LGBTQ people.

That would have been a spoiler for me! I love a good plot with spoilers - tho prefer them unspoilt 🤣 Such a great immersive read. It really had me gripped.

You're right - this sounded scaled up, slick, professional. And surely staffed? I wanted to know how many people worked there. I had heard of her, but what she was doing sounded more like a version of, e.g., the Oprah or Jenna Bush Hager book clubs.

Money buys influence anywhere! I value opinions of many influencers and critics on Instagram and Substack more than I do most reviews in trad media. I post reviews myself. But some parts of influencer culture are too much for me - the gush, the hot takes, the shallow commodifying this piece gets at.

The vapid world of America's top book influencer

Ow! A harsh but necessary dissection - of publishing, of modern life

‘Zibby is a representative figure in a cultural crisis: The Zibbyverse is a place where there are no books, really, only book-commodities to be sold. And nobody knows, or can tell, the difference.’

I just *loved* it! I have to read it again

Beginnings - A Zoom Masterclass A Zoom Masterclass Monday 13 January 2025, 7pm-8.30pm London time, £50 Beginner’s mind – getting started Fresh starts for new ideas, rebooting old projects, setting out in writing, trying a differe…

Zoom Masterclasses for 2025 start on 13 January with Beginnings, which explores how we begin and sustain a successful writing practice: through work, through play, through cultivating beginner’s mind. We'll also look at ways to craft strong openings for our stories.

wille.org/beginnings

No higher endorsement - and thanks for saying so 😘