Black Lamb

The All Movie Issue

I didn't lose it at the movies

September 1st, 2003

BY TERRY ROSS

In June, loyal readers will remember, I asked Black Lamb’s occasional contributors and regular columnists to write on a book that had influenced them. This month, I’ve asked them to do the same for a film. The result is the All-Movie Issue.

Thanks be to God, the writers didn’t repeat June’s prank. Back then, a mischievous subgroup of your favorite columnists played a nasty trick on their indulgent editor and sent in a passel of book articles on a single author, James Michener, a noted ransacker of libraries. I thought they’d all lost their minds simultaneously. Scared the hell out of me. This time, I feared an onslaught of articles praising the acting talent of Clint Eastwood or the films of Blake Edwards.

Mercifully, I was spared these indignities.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Movie Issue, Movies, Ross | Link to this Entry

The All Book Issue

... and the incredibly cruel All-Book Issue hoax

June 1st, 2003

BY TERRY ROSS

This month’s edition of Black Lamb — which I call the All-Book Issue — is a departure from the norm, because this magazine was created as a reincarnation of the old-fashioned literary Miscellany. Most months, that’s what it is, with the writers checking in from wherever they are — geographically, professionally, psychically — on whatever subjects or anecdotes they choose. It becomes a potpourri of different (and sometimes differing) voices and lives.

But for the June issue, the halfway point in our first year, I proposed that the writers choose a book and write about it in the context of their regular columns. Not book reviews, I said, but rather essays on how influential books had changed their lives. About a month before the copy deadline, I sent a mass email to most of the contributors (a few had already sent in their articles) to remind them of this assignment. That’s when the fun started.

Noting the copy deadline of April 1, one of the writers, Bud Gardner (his column's calledCountry Lawyer) copied the others’ email addresses from my message and wrote to them all, suggesting a prank. Country apparently called to country, for Emily Emerson (En Campagne) in west-central France immediately proposed that everyone write about the same book. Too hard, someone else said, we have no book in common. How about the same author, then, piped in Rebecca Owen from Pittsburgh, Pa. And thus came into being, at least conceptually, Black Lamb’s first, and certainly its last, All James Michener Issue.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Book Issue, Books and Authors, Ross | Link to this Entry

Author profile

December 1st, 2002

Terry Ross edits, designs, and publishes Black Lamb and The Ultimate Literary Calendar.

Posted by: The Editors
Category: Ross | Link to this Entry