For Practicing Writers: Mid-Month Update

A few timely notes.

Greetings, all:

I know that we all receive a lot of email, and I try to limit my presence in your inboxes to a once-monthly rate. But I did want to take this opportunity to offer a couple of quick notes today.

As many of you know, in addition to the monthly newsletter that’s now hosted here on Substack, for years I’ve been posting a lot of related content multiple times each week on the two blogs that are housed on my website. This includes weekly “Markets and Jobs” posts on the Practicing Writing blog.

Those Markets and Jobs posts, which typically publish Monday mornings, feature opportunities that don’t make it into the monthly newsletters. They also include more “hyper-local” calls, contests, and jobs that are less likely to be relevant for the global newsletter readership.

(NB: I’ve been maintaining the blogs for a long time; I encourage you to subscribe to them, or at the very least follow me here on Substack and/or on social media, where I routinely share links to these posts. I haven’t yet had the “bandwidth” to determine how I might transition to some form of routinely posting the same content in Substack posts. What can I say? I can only manage to do so much in the 24 hours we’re given each day.)

On that note: Much of my energy lately was devoted to preparing for last Sunday’s Jewish Book Council Writers’ Conference, where I moderated a panel titled “Addressing Antisemitism in Our Literary Lives.” In addition to moderating, I participated as a panelist.

As I made clear at the session’s outset, I was speaking for myself only—not for the Jewish Book Council, and not for any of my co-panelists, either. I also said that there was no way I’d be able to cover everything there was to say. That would have been the case even if the (40-minute!) session had been held last summer, when my (three!) co-panelists and I proposed it, and when it was accepted.

If you’re interested in consulting the handout around which I organized my conference remarks—“18 Ways to Address Antisemitism in Your Literary Life”— you’ll find it here. Given the current environment, I didn’t want to wait until I could provide it as a “featured resource” in the next full newsletter in order to share it with those who might wish to check it out.

Speaking of the Jewish Book Council: Did you know that we are currently a little more than one week in to Jewish Book Month? (The dates vary; the month typically concludes on the first night of the Hanukkah holiday—this year, that’s December 7.) It’s a particularly good time to amplify and support Jewish books. I’m doing so with a daily post on Twitter (yes, I’m still there—for now—and I’m still calling it that).

I’ll be back with another Substack post at the end of the month: December’s edition of

The Practicing Writer 2.0: A Newsletter from Erika Dreifus

. Until then, I’m wishing everyone—especially those who will be observing Thanksgiving—a good start to the holiday season.

And, as the saying on so many holiday greeting cards aspires to each year: “Peace on Earth.”

ERIKA

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About Erika Dreifus: Erika is a writer, teacher, and literary consultant whose books include Birthright: Poems and Quiet Americans: Stories. A Fellow in the Sami Rohr Jewish Literary Institute and an adjunct associate professor at Baruch College/CUNY, she lives in New York. Please visit ErikaDreifus.com to learn more about her work and follow her right here on Substack, on Facebook, and/or on Twitter, where she tweets (mostly) “on matters bookish and/or Jewish.”