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George Getschow, our writer-in-residence for the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, calls us "The Tribe" -- The Mayborn Tribe. Every summer, the University of North Texas gathers authors and would-be authors to discuss narrative writing. So gather round and sample some of the best writing by our tribe. |
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From the Fringe to the Forefront [ read ]
A young writer's fascination with the unusual results in inclusion in two 2009 Best American anthologies
by Valerie Gordon
Mayborn | 2009
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You never know when you’re going to run into an outrageously good idea for a story, let alone one good enough to win a spot in an anthology of the year’s best crime reporting. And usually, you don’t get great ideas from sleep-starved med students. And most of all, you don’t get fresh leads in a story 45 years old, one covered by every newspaper, magazine and investigative committee on Capitol Hill, much less one that Oliver Stone made into a major motion picture.
What’s new to say about the Kennedy assassination, after all?
Trust Mike Mooney to have the idea fall into his lap during a call with his best friend, a third-year medical student who had listened, enthralled, as a lecture about pancreatic cancer turned instead into a conversation about the harrowing, historic day in 1963 when John F. Kennedy lay on a hospital room cart, his head gaping open from an assassin’s bullet. The student, Andrew Jennings, immediately picked up the phone and called his buddy Mike to share the story of Dr. Robert McClelland, the aging surgeon who had cradled the president’s brains in his hands and massaged Lee Harvey Oswald’s heart at the same hospital two days later. [read] |
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Confessions of a literary agent ... a weary one [ read ]
Donavan's Equation of Book Viability
by James Donovan
Mayborn | 2008 |
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Call it Donovan’s Equation of Book Viability. It’s a highly unmathematical formula that would make a mathematician grab his binomials.
I’ve been a literary agent for 15 years. Previous to that I was a trade book editor, and before that I held jobs in the retail end of the business—bookseller, store manager and bookstore chain buyer. Any dunderhead stationed on the front lines of the bookselling battle would learn something about the purchasing preferences of book buyers. I hope to God I did.
As an agent, I’ve evaluated and critiqued the prose of hundreds of good writers. I’ve sold plenty of their books to major publishers, but not all. No agent does, no matter what they claim. After slogging around in the business for so long, I think I’ve developed a sense of what’s publishable—or, rather, saleable—in the way of nonfiction, and what’s not.
Emphasis on the not. [read] |
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