Day 12: Getting & Giving Feedback with Daphne Kalotay and Margot Livesey
Day 12: Getting & Giving Feedback with Daphne Kalotay and Margot Livesey
The March March Writing Challenge
Appears in this episode
How to (and how not to) give and receive feedback, with authors and teachers Daphne Kalotay and Margot Livesey.
For a list of my fave craft books and the most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page.
Margot Livesey grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She is the author of nine novels, a collection of stories and a book of essays about the craft of fiction. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and spends much of the year in Cambridge, Ma.
Daphne Kalotay is the author of the story collection, Calamity and Other Stories, as well as the novels Russian Winter, Sight Reading, and Blue Hours. Her bestselling work has been published in twenty languages and won her numerous national and international awards. Her forthcoming collection, The Archivists, won the the 2021 Grace Paley Prize and will be published in Spring 2023.Daphne lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and teaches at Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing.
Day 12: Getting & Giving Feedback with Daphne Kalotay and Margot Livesey
Wonderful discussion of feedback. I think it's important to learn how to be a discerning receiver (and giver) of feedback. I'm careful who I ask for feedback. I look for "book group" feedback from a small group of literate friends, but also seek out "professional" feedback from writers, which tends to be of a more technical nature. And then I look for recurring themes. In my case I kept getting feedback that my antagonist wasn't working. If everyone is telling you the same thing, believe them.
Excited about Daphne Kalotay's new book in April, and really wish I could find a class with Margot Livesay (like the rest of the writing world I imagine), whose comment about setting and murky details in the beginning really resonated and I think really has helped me approach a current problem (if only for the lovely company!). This was great. Now I have to catch up on more.