When a gifted poet approaches the novel, the results can be compelling, unusual, certainly bizarre; but exactly what you’ll get is hard to imagine. At the same time I decided to be, or realized I was, a writer, I came…
A Conversation with Sidney Williams
An interview by Alicia Cole. Sidney Williams is the author of eight traditionally published books, five under his own name and three young adult titles under his Michael August pseudonym. He’s also written a host of short stories for magazines…
Guest Post: In Defense of Fanfiction by Erika Staiger
Like a lot of creative writing MFA students, I’m spending my summer trying to turn a few half-written scenes into a novel that I hope might become my thesis (I’m in the I-should-have-just-gone-to-law-school-like-my-parents-wanted-me-to faze of my writing process, thanks for…
Guest Post: What to Remember While Time Traveling by Lisa Aldridge
My grandfather took me fishing when I was a little girl. I’ll never forget the thrill of catching my first fish and the utter horror at how that fish flopped around helplessly gasping for gill-filtered oxygen. Until the moment I…
Guest Post: Because of Merwin by Michelle Boland
It’s time for a confession. I have been hiding my poetry writing as a shameful secret for quite some time. Those few occasions when I spoke the words out loud to someone, “I’m a poet,” I felt like I was…
Guest Post: Writing into the Void by Sarah Bradley
It’s something straight out of a science fiction novel: a dark and limitless expanse, full of bright stars, as foreign and intangible as any distant galaxy. It’s a kind of limbo, a gray area where my thoughts are made concrete…
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: 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…
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: 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…