Special Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop Edition

The Grass is Always Greener When It's Bursting Through Concrete*

I want to welcome all the new subscribers from the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop — I really enjoyed our time together. This year’s conference was the best I’ve ever been to with so many highlights.

This edition is just for you and if you are anything like me, you are STILL decompressing from our trip, sorting out in my head all that I learned. So this edition will keep it light. Just cartoons (about writing & publishing) and a few observations with the drawings I made during the event.

As new paid subscribers, you can go back and enjoy previous editions of The Bob like the following:

(Do you love New Yorker cartoons?) The Best New Yorker Cartoons Voted By ME

(Do you love museums and books?) A Sneak Peek to My New Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums. (I just started a GoodReads Giveaway for my new book. Enter here for FREE. Ten winners will receive a signed copy with a personalized drawing inside.)

(Ready for more ideas to improve your humor writing?) Writing Funnier: Part 1 and then Writing Funnier: Part II

Thanks, Bob

•This is a nod to one of Erma Bombeck’s famous bestsellers but an expression I’ve had for years regarding growing up poor.

The following cartoons appeared in Jane Friedman’s The Hot Sheet, essential reading for writers and those in publishing. To subscribe go here.

The following drawings were from this year’s Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop 2024. I will post in the future a link where one can see all twenty drawings.

I don’t think Ms. Mitchard was discouraging writing but inspiring fresh writing. As the great Wislawa Szymborska had advised, “…make it seem like the first time, [you] must make new lyric discoveries. Otherwise – hasn’t enough been written already?”

I just meet both Amy and Bonnie but we just started our conversations and will cross paths again. The best part of these conferences is the invaluable networking. I just watched Bonnie’s TED Talk on Contempt Versus Connection in Online Communication. Amazing.

I let other people be smart. My brain is like a pea in a soda can. I just try to make good decisions. I was often asked at the conference how I do these drawings. Trial and error. Try something and then decide if it’s good or not. To leave it or start over. Simple as that. Exact same thing in writing.

Until 2026. By then I will have recovered from my hangover from playing the drinking game of taking a drink every time you hear the word journey.

In Soapbox I like to shine a light on new books coming out. In bookstores now two titles from two talented friends of mine…

Vegetariana: A Rich Harvest of Wit, Lore, & Recipes by Nava Atlas is celebrating its 40th anniversary and is still one of the quirkiest entries in the field of hand-illustrated cookbooks. 170 vegan recipes plus literary quotations, folk wisdom, botanical lore, and historical anecdotes.

How to Baby: A No-Advice-Given Guide to Motherhood, with Drawings is a graphic memoir skewering the “traditional” parenting book to chronicle the joys of new parenthood by the acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist and author Liana Finck.

“Bob Eckstein is a national treasure.”  — David Plotz, CEO of City Cast, former CEO of Atlas Obscura

The back entrance to the LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. If you come in through teh front entrance, one is greeted by the Three Stooges reciting “Hello, hello, hello…hello.”

Marhill Museum of Art is in Goldendale, Washington and has an enormous replica of Stonehedge.

Théåtre de la Mode mannequin from the Maryhill Museum of Art.

My rendition of Henri de Toulouse’s At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance (1890). It resides at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The garden at the MET, The Cloisters in New York City. This is where I used to write my New Yorker cartoons and where I took my profile photo below.

Any book’s success is driven by word-of-mouth and reviews. So, if you enjoy the book, I would greatly appreciate any love you can give my way.

From Writer’s Digest