Did you see that amazing cover art? We are in love with the cover painting by Mainer Matt Welch, “I’ll Be Here All Week.” Inside, there are some outstanding contributor letters in the “Love Letters” section, which we nominated for a Pushcart. Such luminaries as Sharon Olds, Stephen Dunn, and Barbara Hurd wrote extraordinary poems, alongside with the up-and-coming fan favorite Van Newell, who wrote a love letter to southern food. Sara Patton’s story, “The Bull Rider,” is outstanding, as is former Portlander Quenton Baker’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Nigger.” Also of note are the Mainer writer interviews this round: Lewis Robinson, Elizabeth Miles (a/k/a Phoenix writer Deirdre Fulton), and Patrick Quinlan. We are very proud of this issue.
3) What can people expect from the Longfellow Books reading this Friday? Will you be reading other people’s pieces, or your own, or a combination?
Our reading at Longfellow on Friday will be an “editor’s reading.” Scott Wolven and I will be reading our own original work. We’ve gotten a lot of requests for a reading like this, and we went with it! We will both be reading new original short stories. As always, we’ll bring some wine and cheese and crackers and a lot of enthusiasm. We will also be talking about The New Guard and The Writer’s Hotel.
 THE NEW GUARD founder Shanna McNair |
4) Tell me about The Writer’s Hotel—the educational piece of your operation. You just finished up this year’s conference in New York City. What made it so successful, and what do you hope will come of this program?
The Writer’s Hotel is the online editorial and teaching arm of The New Guard, run by myself and Scott Wolven. The Writer’s Hotel Master Class is a conference we began this year and yes, it was an absolute smash. We will be holding the conference once a year in Midtown Manhattan in mid-June. We decided to host the conference in New York City because it is at the heart of the publishing industry, and we wanted to make meaningful connections for people. We also wanted to get writers all charged up, get them a great place to read in the city, and help coach them to reconceive of their writing and the writing process. We aim to give writers new tools and opportunities, help them write a proper query letter, get a slick first 50 pages to show to an agent, and have some fun along the way.
The Writer’s Hotel Master Class is set at a floating campus in Midtown Manhattan between three writer’s hotels: The Algonquin Hotel, Library Hotel, and The Bryant Park Hotel. The Writer’s Hotel Editors worked with accepted writers immediately upon acceptance to the Master Class, helping to polish manuscripts in anticipation of meeting agents on site, and we also worked with our writers for a full month afterward. Several of our writers have since been published and/or signed to an agency. Many agency and publishing decisions are still pending, and we’re excited to have made so many connections for our writers.
On site this June at The Bryant Park and Library Hotels, we ran a rigorous schedule. We held writing workshops, lectures on writing craft, and agent panels. We also hosted agent speed-dating and put our writers in direct contact with agents. We had six agencies represented on site and two acquisitions editors gave a generous seminar, representing Little, Brown and Simon & Schuster.
