How to Write a Press Release

As a magazine editor and writer, I’ve been reading press releases for more than a decade. This week, Southern California Review, where I serve as editor-in-chief, named the winners of the 2008 Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, and now I find myself on the other side of the mutually beneficial yet at-times antagonistic media-marketing relationship.
Yet drafting [...]

Screenwriting 101

Among the books piled on my living-room ottoman with Vroman’s Bookstore bookmarks wedged somewhere between the first page and the last is Syd Field’s The Screenwriter’s Workbook. It’s the first screenwriting manual I’ve ever picked up.
Yes, it is unexpected that a working writer in Los Angeles actually doesn’t write screenplays—kind of like telling a stranger [...]