Vito Grippi

From the Brevity Blog

Vito — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 05:04:05 +0000

Check out my recent post from AWP at the Brevity Blog.

Prettying Up the Baby: Publishing Creative Nonfiction in a Challenging Market.

Ava Chin, Dawn Raffel, and Marion Winik

Disclaimer: This panel did speak about getting published, building an audience, and although at times difficult, making a little money. Or in Marion Winik’s case, a lot of money spread out over a long period of time. As a long-time friend and former student of Winik, the business end of writing creative nonfiction is something I’m familiar with. Still, Ava Chin’s reminder to write the things you’d write even if you were to never get paid was refreshing. And Dawn Raffel’s look into creative nonfiction from the editor’s perspective was instructional. But as a teacher of creative nonfiction, I find myself struggling to define the genre on a regular basis. For me, it is that obscurity, the seemingly endless possibilities of the literary personal essay (which can barely be contained in a definition itself), that makes the form so exciting and worth discovering. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make my ambition to get undergraduate students excited to write personal essays any easier.

Discussing Smart(er)literature at Luna Park Review

Vito — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:24:47 +0000

Somewhere along the way, I made a conscious decision to not buy an iPhone, or an iPad, or until recently, an iPod touch (which actually belongs to my daughter). Aside from one small snag, I’ve been nothing but happy with my Android device. It plays nice with all of the other Google things I do. And I like that it’s a little geekier than the iPhone.

I originally meant this piece to cover the lack of literary apps for Android. I intended to cry that lit mags, and literary enterprises in general, show Android no love. I was going to whine how it doesn’t make sense that Android users have to miss out on the cools apps, especially when the number of Android users, and the number of Android app downloads in the 2nd quarter of 2011, surpassed those for iPhone and iTunes, respectively.

continue reading at Luna Park Review

Today I built a cottage

Vito — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:29:00 +0000

This is the most productive I’ve been in a long time.

Everything Must Go/Why Don’t You Dance?

Vito — Thu, 12 May 2011 04:45:10 +0000

Not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, it makes perfect sense. Carver’s stories leave a lot of room for interpretation, to fill in the blanks. I’ve learned by now never to judge a film based on my perceptions of a book. That sort of thinking always leads to the “the book was better” argument. I’ve actually found some pleasure in reading a book after seeing the movie. But that’s only happened a few times (Little Children, Empire Falls), and I suppose that notion only plays into the argument even further.

At some point, we have to accept a film on its own merit, pretend the book does not exist for a couple of hours. This is what I tell people when the grumbling begins, which is, of course, easier said than done. That said, I recently spoke with a Harry Potter fanatic who had yet to read one book. It took everything in me to not explain that the movies came from books that were, in many ways, better. But that was an argument for another day.

Here are a few other examples of films based on short stories (from Bark).

Under construction

Vito — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:20:51 +0000

Now that the semester is finally winding down, I am making an honest attempt to update this site. Of course, I am also making an honest attempt to do lots of things now that the semester is over. We’ll see, we’ll see. For now, a completely random picture.