Happy Thanksgiving to all
our readers and contributors. At The Writer offices in suburban Milwaukee, it’s
been a quiet holiday week, with half the staff away on vacations. My colleague
Sarah Lange and I have been steering the ship in their absence, managing, so
far, to avoid rocks and sandbars (though we had a close call).
I’ve been editing some
articles for our April issue, plus diving for many hours into the query basket,
where, due to a number of reasons, I’ve gotten behind this year. (My apologies
to those query writers who’ve gotten a slower response than I would have
liked.) I hope to be up to speed there in a few weeks.
Bookworms like me, and, I presume, most of our magazine’s readers,
look forward to a long holiday weekend since it promises, along with great
family time and great food, more time to read. Tonight I’m looking forward to
finishing Keith Richards’ predictably drug-heavy memoir, Life, so that I can
start Tom Nolan’s biography of the great crime-fiction novelist Ross MacDonald.
Having finished Jhumpa Lahiri’s fine short-story collection Interpreter of
Maladies, it’ll also be time to start a new story collection, by a different
author. Haven’t decided yet who’ll get the nod.
All the literary, familial and culinary peasures of the holiday will, I hope, make up what I fear
will be tomorrow’s first season loss by the Green Bay Packers, at the hands of
the Detroit Lions, blemishing the Pack’s perfect 10-0 record. I hope I’m wrong,
but I see Green Bay’s weaknesses finally catching up with them. But I'm a grown-up. I can handle this. I think.
Anyway, happy holiday to all.
-- Ron Kovach, senior editor, The Writer