Will Rogers Writers’ Workshop, OKLAHOMA CITY — Susan Driscoll, CEO of iUniverse, spoke first, following a hot breakfast buffet to which the self-publishing firm treated us. I see why friends have published books, several of whom have gone the print-on-demand route, yet it’s not for me. No books. I’m more of a pamphleteer. But after […]
Will Rogers Writer’s Workshop, OKLAHOMA CITY — This Friday-Saturday set of seminars concerned humor writing — for newspapers, magazines, books and in one session greeting cards, covering the writing of funny essays but also sound feature reporting. Improving one’s marketing skills was featured in several ways. The impact of the Internet must have been mentioned […]
What kind of reader are you? I like sentences so I tend to read word for word, have to force myself to skim. My Beloved looks for content. In print, she refuses to allow cleverness or grace to detour her, though she appreciates good lines in drama, as well as deep thoughts. Who reads, now? […]
The recently late Art Buchwald said something to the effect of that writing political humor meant he never ran out of ideas, he had five or six every morning (when I find that quote I’ll revise this). The even-more recently late Molly Ivins said something like she thanked the good Lord for giving her infinite […]
Earlier this century — hah! — I created a master’s thesis on how newspaper humor columns have changed. In figuring out how to tackle this, how to quantify the research to make it as solid as possible, I hit a problem: Not all humor writers are alike. Some seem to write with the intent of […]
A great columnist passes. It’s Art Buchwald, about whom I wrote nearly a year ago, when he’d been in hospice just a few weeks and well before he recovered enough to get thrown out. Actually he was a part of my master’s thesis of spring 2003, which researched the apparent death of the newspaper humor […]