Do you enjoy being condescended to? Is the opportunity to listen to a tedious laundry list of someone else's publications your reason for taking a writing class? If so, then Mashey Bernstein's the writing instructor for you. He's been published, which certainly means that he knows how to be published - but whether or not he can communicate that knowledge is something else entirely. And a word of advice to any bright-eyed would-be authors thinking of taking his class: his own writing style, while publishable (as he will remind you, be assured), isn't exactly stunning. As an example of his deathless prose, here's the first line of an In Memoriam article he wrote about Norman Mailer: "No writer on the American literary scene could get people steamed up the way writer Norman Mailer, who died last Saturday at the age of 84, could." Heartfelt, check. Printed in an actual newspaper, check. Incredibly clumsy sentence structure, check.
Do you enjoy being condescended to? Is the opportunity to listen to a tedious laundry list of someone else's publications your reason for taking a writing class? If so, then Mashey Bernstein's the writing instructor for you. He's been published, which certainly means that he knows how to be published - but whether or not he can communicate that knowledge is something else entirely. And a word of advice to any bright-eyed would-be authors thinking of taking his class: his own writing style, while publishable (as he will remind you, be assured), isn't exactly stunning. As an example of his deathless prose, here's the first line of an In Memoriam article he wrote about Norman Mailer: "No writer on the American literary scene could get people steamed up the way writer Norman Mailer, who died last Saturday at the age of 84, could." Heartfelt, check. Printed in an actual newspaper, check. Incredibly clumsy sentence structure, check.