Susannah Mandel Assistant Organizer of The Philadelphia Writers Meetup Group

No title yet.

Member of this
Meetup Group since

February 15, 2007

Introduction

Hi there. I recently moved to Philadelphia after a couple of years out of the country. I'm working on learning how to write. This is a long-overdue project for me. I look forward to meeting other people, and talking, learning, and sharing work.

What is your favorite writing saying?

[The quality that goes] to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature... I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. (Keats.)

What is your favorite book on writing?

_Letters to a Young Poet_, by Rainer Maria Rilke. (I'm also finding _Advice for New Faculty Members_, by academic psychologist Robert Boice, very helpful right now.)

What do you write?

I like literary fiction and what you might call the slipstream -- work neither 'realist' nor precisely fantastic. I love the play of symbols and the unmasking of the invisible world. That's true for literary nonfiction, too.

What do you read?

e.g.: Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury, Jeanette Winterson, Ursula LeGuin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Truman Capote, Lewis Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Bruce Chatwin, Emily Dickinson, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Thomas Wyatt, Georges Perec, Kelly Link, St-Exupéry.

Tell me something else about yourself, please?

I have a degree in English literature. I speak amusingly accented, slangy French. I love science fiction. I like comic books. I have a problem with time management. I like trees, train rides, the sun, my young calico cat, my curly hair.