Librarian Sara Scribner on why in the digital age we still need librarians (and, I’d add, humanities professors):

An info-literate student can find the right bit of information amid the sea of irrelevance and misinformation. But any college librarian will tell you that freshman research skills are absolutely abysmal. Before they graduate from high school, students need to be able tounderstand the phenomenal number of information options at their fingertips, learn how to work with non-Google-style search queries, avoid plagiarism and judge whether the facts before them were culled by an expert in the field or tossed off by a crackpot in the basement.

As even struggling school districts manage to place computers in classrooms, it’s difficult to find a child without Internet access. But look closer at what happens when students undertake an academic task as simple as researching global warming — tens of millions of hits on Google — and it becomes clear that the so-called divide is not digital but informational. It’s not about access; it’s about agility.

Read the full essay “Saving the Google Students” at the LA Times.

Novelist and literature professor Eric Puchner on what makes a good story title:

Even if we end up cutting the original “creative beginning” of a novel or short story—the part of the novel or story, often, that we’re most attached to—this doesn’t mean it’s not an essential part of the writing process. In some ways, it’s the most essential. The same goes for titles, I think. I’ve heard students tell me they come up with their titles first, before they have the slightest notion of a plot. I see nothing wrong with this, so long as they’re willing to give up their “creative title” when it no longer serves the story….

In short, there seems to be very little correlation between producing something brilliant and the ability to come up with a half-decent name for it. Perhaps it’s a different skill set entirely. I sometimes think there should be professional titlers: Just as we wouldn’t ask a carpenter to tar the roof of our house, we shouldn’t expect writers to work outside their métier. But even if the perfect title is destined to elude us, I do think it’s possible to identify a bad one—even, I think, to lay out some basic ground rules for what to steer clear of.

Read the rest of this essay — including a humorous list of “Titles to Avoid” — at The Rumpus.

Writer David Rothman on the lengths we take to secure a muse, in this case, a pristine copy of Paul Bailey’s latest novel, Uncle Rudolph:

The express train gone, I turned back to my left to see if a local was coming. As I turned, I lost control of the book and it slid out of my hands and down onto the tracks. Yet when I looked down Uncle Rudolph was gone. Had the book fallen through to the busy intersection below? Had it somehow defied gravity and not fallen when I dropped it? Then I saw its profile, its spine facing upward. The novel had gotten stuck between the platform wall and the tracks. Uncle Rudolph was literally hanging on a thin metal bar, inches from the train tracks. My first thought was to climb down and get it, but the tracks were perhaps fifteen feet down from the platform and it would be quite risky to expose myself like that. I saw a number of people pointing at the hanging novel. A moment later a 7 train rolled by and I held my breath. I was not worried about paying the lost book library fine. I simply couldn’t imagine waiting weeks to find out what happened to Uncle Rudolph and his nephew in London. The train roared by and the novel shook a bit, but didn’t budge. Three more trains passed right in front of my eyes and the book stayed put.

I ran down to tell the station attendant, who nodded and said that “special teams” would meet me on the platform within a half an hour. Who were these people in “special teams,” I wondered. I stood again at the platform, guarding the novel with my stare, as each train came and went, dropping off and picking up anxious passengers. Twenty minutes later, there they were: the special teams unit, three guys in white uniforms running off the train holding long poles with nets. They looked like members of a lacrosse team. “Where is the object?” a man with a French accent said.

I pointed, he swept Uncle Rudolph up, handed me the book and had me sign a document. Then my three heroes in white suits waved good-bye and hopped onto the next train.

Read the rest in Glimmer Train’s Bulletin 36.

Novelist and short story writer Carrie Brown on writing about the underdog and her appreciation [shared with me!] for the novels of Iris Murdoch:

I’m interested in what seems to me the harrowing ordinariness of an ordinary life, and maybe the underdog is the archetypal ordinary man….  I am a great admirer of Iris Murdoch, who took her philosophical training at Oxford and then went on to write some thirty or so novels, a remarkable achievement. I like her work because I like her characters’ preoccupation with the state of their souls and the nature of goodness—their own, other people’s, the world’s. I’m interested in goodness the way some writers are interested in evil, perhaps, although maybe they’re just two sides of the same coin. I’m interested in how we grapple with the ethical, moral questions in our lives. I see the challenges of our lives, the conflicts, in those terms, as questions of right and wrong, good and bad. I’m interested in the emotional and psychological dimension of the struggle to be good, to live an ethically responsible life. I’m interested in how shockingly difficult it is to be good. And I’m interested in our failures in that regard—exactly how we fail and why, how we console ourselves and others, how we forgive ourselves and others, how we fail to forgive.

Read the rest of her interview in Glimmer Train’s Bulletin 34.

Writer Charles Baxter on five questions to ask yourself about stories, starting with “what do these characters want?”:

…this is an old thing to say, but if you want to write something about issues, write an essay. That’s what essays are for. If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. But that’s why it’s important to have a sense of what your characters want.

Read the rest of this interview in Glimmer Train’s Bulletin 32.