JANUARY 2025

Awe

Letter from Alex

As you may have seen, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris has been revived after a devastating fire almost six years ago that sent its iconic spire tumbling to the ground.

Amazingly, it’s been rebuilt, mostly using the exact same materials and techniques that were used when construction began in 1163. Some of this is unseen, such as the oak support beams, and much of it radiates to the eye, like the erasure of time’s grime to the stone, stained glass, and pipe organ. 

About the restoration, Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, wrote:

For a wider world, it underscores that calamities are surmountable, that some good and true things endure—that humanity may not yet have lost touch with its best self.

This past year, I read Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for the first time, a breathtaking tale that takes you high and low through the cathedral, often following Quasimodo the bell-ringer who scales and descends the building both inside and out with muscular arms and deaf ears. At the end, I gasped when I discovered where Quasimodo ended up. If you’re in the mood for melodrama mixed with history, give it a go.

The cathedral comes alive in the book, a place of sin and sanctuary, as here:

Only the great rose window of the façade, whose thousand colors were steeped in a ray of horizontal sunlight, glittered in the gloom like a mass of diamonds, and threw its dazzling reflection to the other end of the nave.

Hugo partly intended the book, published in 1831, as a cri de coeur for preserving the cathedral, which had fallen into disrepair. The story so captured the public’s imagination that the King ordered a major restoration, which goes to show the power of a good tale.

I’m also reminded of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” which I often revisit, about a closed-off man who finds his life cracking open when he draws a cathedral on paper with a blind man’s hand atop his, to give the blind man a sense of what a cathedral looks like. The story is included and deeply analyzed in Gotham’s book Writing Fiction.

And why this matters to you and me…

Creating a work of art—be it a painting or poem or pyramid—is a miraculous event. People have been doing it for, well, who knows how long? You may be doing it now…or hoping to. It can be done. The results may be magnificent. Yet even if they fall short of that mark, there’s an overpowering beauty in the act of aspiring.

Alex Steele

President, Gotham Writers Workshop

Student Success

Douglass Street Books published Anita Bushell's novel One Way to Whitefish.

Benbella Books published Megan Barry's memoir It's What You Do Next: The Fall and Rise of Nashville's First Female Mayor.

Rappahannock Review published Regina Landor's story "Goodbye to Clocks Ticking".

Donna Harold self-published her fantasy novel Raptor's Realm: Protector of the Voiceless.

Tell us about your writing success!

Email dana@gothamwriters.com

Meet Our Teachers

Melissa Petro's nonfiction book Shame On You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification is a finalist for the Non-Obvious Book Awards.

NPR named Teresa Wong's graphic memoir All Our Ordinary Stories one of its Favorite Books of 2024. 

Love, Brooklyn, a feature film written by Paul Zimmerman, is a selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. 

Sinister Wisdom published Serrana Laure Gay's story "Ogygia." 

Teacher Excerpt

Submissions Closing Temporarily

Submissions for Gotham’s literary magazine, The Razor, will close on January 1, 2025! We will reopen submissions in late summer/early fall of 2025, so don’t worry—you’ll have plenty of time to get your flash fiction and flash nonfiction stories in order. If you have any questions please reach out at therazor@gothamwriters.com.

Gotham’s Genre Fiction Conference

The Gotham Writers Genre Fiction Conference will take place March 1-2, 2025.

On Day 1, take a peek behind the publishing curtain at our eye-opening panels and presentations, including an interview with New York Times-bestselling author of The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix.

Plus, applications are open for our Pitching Roundtables, where a group of pre-selected writers can present their book projects for feedback from two top literary agents.

Writing Buzz

THE (WRITING) PROCESS

Are Memoirs “Impossible to Sell”? Only If Narrowly Defined — Brevity

New Year, New Habits: How to Start Writing with Author Kelly Corrigan — NPR

3 Ways to Use (and Not Use) Music for Your Screenwriting — ScreenCraft

LISTS & GUIDES

The Best Book Covers of 2024 — Lit Hub

10 Incredible 90's Movies Barely Anyone Talks About — ScreenRant

Barack Obama's Favorite Books, Movies, and Music of 2024 — Medium

TRENDS & RELEASES

— Defector

Melissa Febos on Her Face — The Yale Review

The Garden, a Conversation Between Olivia Liang and Jamaica Kincaid — Granta

JUST FOR FUN

How Did Lesbian Pulp Fiction Thrive in the 1950s and 60s? — The New York Times

A Tour of Karl Ove Knausgaard's Library — The Washington Post

Kafka's Screwball Tragedy — The MIT Press Reader

‘Til next month,

Gotham Writers