Winter Writing News--Austen, Austen, and a Little Bit of Everything Else

[Sarah Seltzer]

Happy Thanksgivvukah.

Welcome--or welcome back--to my seasonal writing newsletter! Here is a selection of what I've been up to since summer ended.

Jane, Jane, Jane: During a free-indirect-discourse heavy autumn, I ranked Jane Austen movies for Vulture, and thought about Austen fandom for the LA Review of Books and Austen adaptations for Salon.

 

Pew-Jew stuff: Another big topic this season was the Pew Survey of American Jews. I was happy to write about being a proud secular Jew with a dash of atheist spirituality at the Sisterhood and to chat millennial cultural Jewishness on NPR's The Takeaway.

>>In more Jewy-news, I will be on a panel of bloggers (J-bloggers?) at the JOFA conference in December. And finally, I'm proud to announce that I just joined the board of ZEEK, a (or THE) progressive Jewish magazine.

Random notes: I hung out at home with big-shot social justice leaders Ruth Messinger and Marilyn Sneiderman, part-time roommates, and wrote a fun profile. 

I wrote two pieces on feminist films at RH Reality Check, penned a response to the buzzy novel "The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P" at Lilith, was moved to write an elegy for Lou Reed at the Forward, and mounted a spirited defense of booing Ray Kelly at TPM. 

As for the great selfie debate, I came down in the middle.

I also interviewed Gabi Birkner and Rebecca Soffer about their important new website Modern Loss. 

Wacky and creative: It's been a prosaic, nonfictiony fall, but I slipped a little verse in. My reimagined late adolescent poems at the Hairpin were ridiculously fun to write, as was my abortion rights sonnet, in proper Shakespearean meter. And in fiction news, a short-short-short second person story is up at Extract(s). 

And lastly, apropos of none of the above but because it is awesome, please check out Simon's R. Kelly video.

>>>For those of you in NYC, I'm participating in a cool reading hosted by the lovely Erika Anderson on December 11th ,a date which is apparently the hottest date in December--it conflicts with a mere three of the four holiday parties I was planning to go to this winter. But that's okay, because I'll be bringing my own macabre party with me (I'll be reading my story "Pool Party" and one other piece to be announced).

Happy holidays to all, and thanks SO MUCH for reading these seasonal dispatches! 

Travel safe.

S

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