Vanessa Blakeslee's latest book, Perfect Conditions: stories (Curbside Splendor, 2018), is the winner of the 2019 IPPY Silver Medal for Short Story Fiction, finalist for the Foreword Reviews’ 2018 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award (Short Story), and the Montaigne Medal, and was a Chicago Tribune "Summer Reads" Pick. Blakeslee's debut novel, Juventud (Curbside Splendor, 2015), was … [Read more...]
Bespoke Books: An interview with Jason Stoneking
Celia Galey recently caught up with Jason Stoneking in Paris, to talk with him about his current series of unique, handwritten, Bespoke Books. The interview is transcribed here. Celia: So first I wanted to go back in time, to when you started thinking about the Bespoke Project. When was that? What it is that you were looking for? A new form, a new practice, a new context for … [Read more...]
Why Kerouac?
People say I’m obsessed with Jack Kerouac. They point to my blog, to my checked flannel shirts, to my over 140 Kerouac or Kerouac-related books (that I read, not that I wrote), to the one book I have written (about guess who?), to the friendships I’ve developed because of Kerouac, to my constant bringing up connections to Kerouac in daily conversation, and so on. I’m not sure … [Read more...]
“Write What My Spirit Demands”: An Interview with Devorah Major on Writing in Multiple Genres
Writing in more than one genre can free a writer’s creativity and open up ways of interacting with the world, but writing in multiple genres means making the mental switch from one form to another. San Francisco Poet Laureate Devorah Major has published two novels, five books of poetry, numerous essays, and a symphony with Guillermo Galindo--and offers advice for writers … [Read more...]
Book Review – Betwixt-and-Between: Essays On the Writing Life
Betwixt-and-Between: Essays On the Writing Life by Jenny Boully / Coffee House Press / $16.95 / 140 pgs. Jenny Boully’s fifth book, Betwixt and Between: Essays On the Writing Life, does not neatly assimilate into the tradition of writers writing about writing. Historically, these books blend memoir and how-to into quick, comprehensive, and illustrious reads, most famously … [Read more...]
Realism: Just How Real Is It?
We’ve been sold a bill of goods. The original crime was committed a century and a half ago when literary romanticism was kicked to the curb by Flaubert, Tolstoy, Twain, and other disciples of a new religion: realism. I’m not claiming that I prefer romanticism to realism. I do not. But if I’m going to invest my literary capital, I want to know what I’m buying, and I think I’m a … [Read more...]
Classic Omniscience Revisited: Lessons for the Modern Novelist in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
As a craft technique, nineteenth-century omniscience is mostly brought up these days for the purposes of pointing out that it’s obsolete. It’s old. It’s passé. The presumed authority of the classic omniscient voice is no longer plausible; its sweeping pronouncements no longer ring true. Less God-like points of view, such as first person and limited third—often split into the … [Read more...]
The Twenty-Story Summer
Last summer I put aside work on a novel. Inspiration wasn’t hitting me for the longer work, so instead of obsessing about a lack of progress, I worked on other ideas that accumulated along the way. Then, in the middle of the summer, I had a conversation with a screenwriting friend named Ryan in which he questioned this method, asking me if I wasn’t better served "sticking to … [Read more...]
Negative Capability: Keats and Buddha
The relationship of Buddhism and the poetic process is a sublime yet unexplored topic among Western scholars. It’s about the silent space between the words, not just the word itself. The poet John Keats writes: At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative … [Read more...]
Building a Better Argument
Most of us would agree that a free exchange of ideas is beneficial to society. And most of us probably agree that the quality of this conversation is poorer than it could be. We just have to turn on the television or, worse, the internet, to find insults and shouting the norm. Often the answer is to be more civil to each other. But there is more to it than that. There are ways … [Read more...]
Becoming the World’s Strongest Writer
“To write, you must read.” - Kurt Vonnegut “She needs to read more poetry if she ever wants to become a better writer,” insisted my colleague when talking about one of our weaker creative writing students. I agreed heartily, having browbeat a screenwriter friend with this idea for years. “But I need more time for writing,” he would counter. “I don’t have time for reading … [Read more...]
The Poetry of Walking
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” ― Mary Oliver Would you like to journey down a path that will help conjure creative insight? A common premise in Taoism is, in the literal sense, that Tao means Path, a road that … [Read more...]
With Crooked Legs of Hackberry
At 21, I traveled through India for six months. My world-view had been scrambled, and writing about my travels helped me unscramble it. I had never seen people starving on the streets, their limp bodies scooped up in the morning by a front-end loader. I had never been surrounded by large groups of beggars or lepers. Nobody had ever pushed into my face a live cobra curled in a … [Read more...]
Fully Aboard the Flesh Wagon: Tin House Writers Workshop, Summer 2014
About a week before his fortieth birthday, virgin poet Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881) recorded in his journal that he had “received a woman’s favors” at last. His world was not rocked. “Frankly, compared to what the imagination assumes or expects, they are a small matter,” Amiel sniffed. But the deeply religious Amiel did not give up on lust – or on … [Read more...]
Nature As Muse: The World of Fine Writing
The world is never “too much with us,” said Wordsworth, but not the wild glories, which he treasured, too. Natural gifts reflecting the gifts of the gods, or of Darwin’s insights and those of the plate tectonics wizards. Everything moves. All of this and running water and birds on the wing and paths beckoning us to follow are the inspirations for great writers who, over all … [Read more...]
Where to find literary magazines and other publishers
Want to submit your poetry, fiction, or nonfiction to literary magazines, journals, and presses? On the sites below you can learn which ones are open for submissions, and what they're looking for. Except where noted, all of the sites below are free to use, although you may need to sign up for a free account first. Some offer a tracking feature where you can monitor or report … [Read more...]
