Okay. Poetic license. That’s a thing right? It usually involves a mixed metaphor, a dubiously placed semi colon, a counter-intuitive line break. Wow, that’s licentious, people might disclaim. Behold, the shock-jock of grammar. Look at her go, with her odd…
Guest Post: To Find the Time to Write by Eric Rasmussen
Let’s all imagine a nice middle-America gal named Laura. Laura likes colorful sweaters, loves her daughters, and feels ambivalent about her job, maybe as a nutritionist. Plenty of things bring Laura joy: homemade marinara sauce, suggestive text messages from her…
Guest Post: Poisoned Bait by C. Wade Bentley
Don’t get me wrong—I like poetry. I write it and read it and listen to it. A lot. And that puts me among a very tiny minority of humans. No one is clamoring for more poetry. Poetry is more available…
Writing that is Alive by Ron Clinton Smith
“If you bore yourself, you bore others,” a comedian friend told me years ago. It was true of the very off the wall stand up we were doing at the time, and I’ve lived by it both as a writer…
Guest Post: Wrestling with the Headlines by Sidney Williams
I once pointed a creative writing student in search of mystery story ideas to a Twitter feed that aggregates crime news from across the country. “That’s going to depress me all day,” he said. That wasn’t my intent of course….
Guest Post: Excerpt from the Book, “Underwater Music” by Iryna Lialko
Breath of wind from the sea flows through your mind, you are both the derelict and the pilgrim, wandering through a memory of yesterday’s dream: a mermaid, alone, her tail stung and stripped by salty caustic waves, each one but…
Guest Post: The Creative Nemesis that Keeps Us Humble and Keeps Us Writing by Irene Thalden
This poetry writing is a bitch. I mean really. You get an idea and you rush to get it down on paper—because, you know, if you put it off, it’s gone. Gone, nowhere to be found again. I heard that…
Guest Post: Out of Time by Beth Sherman
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything. – John Irving We must use time creatively. – Martin…
Guest Post: The Importance of Being a Bookworm by Katie Schwartz
Like a lot of people who scribble in notebooks constantly and wear their library cards thin, my early childhood was defined by books. There were books in every room at my grandparents’ house, where I lived until I was six….
Choosing Settings for Your Writing by Christa Carmen
Think of the last place you visited that really stuck out to you. What was it about the locale that made you connect to the experience? What details of the place did you retain and recall at later, unexpected moments,…
Guest Post: The Importance of a Writing Community by Francine Witte
Jack Kerouac famously said “be in love with your life. Every minute of it.” Certainly as writers, we try to embrace this notion. The creating, the expressing, the transformation of thought to word, the sharing of what we do with…
Guest Post: Why I Teach My Creative Writing Courses Like a Good Rock and Roll Show by Ephraim Sommers
The First Song and Mosh: The best rock and roll concert I’ve ever witnessed was not Metallica or Korn at the L.A. Coliseum in the summer of 2000. It was not Tool in Bakersfield at the Bill Graham Auditorium in…