I consider my practice of the literary arts routinely. Do you, dear writer? I’ll appreciate your comments. Being asked to write about my literary practices has galvanized me to think on this in a deeply personal and extended manner. It’s…
Guest Post: Shortcut to Characterization: Music, by Brendan Stephens
For years most of my fiction has been about characters in bands, usually in the punk and hardcore scene. It started with the whole “write what you know” thing. Before I started to write with any sort of regularity, I…
Guest Post: An Open Letter to My Childhood Heroes (And Their Authors) by Liza Carrasquillo
Dear Heroes, I want to start by saying thank you. Thank you for being there for me when I was a child with little else to find comfort in. When I was sick and stuck in bed, we passed through…
Guest Post: As Student Writers by Alena Zhang
We are often intimidated at the thought of putting our writing out into the world. Writing makes us vulnerable; reading someone’s poem is like peeking into their soul. Without writing, however, we would have no way to articulate the inner…
Guest Post: Belly-flopping in other people’s waterholes by Elizabeth Morton
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…