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: 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 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….
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: The Quarrel by Debra Young
It never fails. I sit down to write and the blue screen of death flares up in my head, the gears grind to a halt and it’s quiet up there, but for the voice, irritable and argumentative. What? You want…
Guest Post: The Creative One by CL Bledsoe
I always wanted to be a writer, but I was afraid I never could be because I didn’t think I was creative enough. In the fifth grade, my public school moved me into Honors classes based on standardized test scores….
Guest Post: How the Marx Brothers Taught Me to Write Poetry by Marcella Benton
Okay, so maybe the Marx Brothers didn’t really teach me to write poetry, but these wordplay magicians did ingrain in me a love of humor and language that helped seed my desire to manipulate language myself. I’m not the only…
A Conversation with Sharanya Manivannan
An interview by Alicia Cole. The poet Sharanya Manivannan’s first book of fiction, The High Priestess Never Marries, has been described in The Establishment as “a tour de force of language, desire, and ancestral heartbeats.” It has just been published…
Guest Post: A Late Bloomer’s Guide to Publishing by Chelsey Drysdale
Until I walked into a UCLA Extension personal essay class in January 2013 when I was 39-years-old, I was an unpublished perfectionist with a fear of failure so debilitating I hadn’t written a word in two years. I was a…
Guest Post: The Accidental Poets by William Greenfield
Some decades ago I unwittingly fathered a baby girl. Through some trick of fate or the magic of genetics, that baby girl helped me develop into something loosely resembling a poet. I say “loosely” because part of me believes that…
Guest Post: The Art of Construction by Shaina Clingempeel
Oftentimes, people picture the modern poet as an outspoken individual. This individual shares even her early scraps. I, however, differ from this image. Throughout college, I dreaded the workshop circle. While I like the concept of collaboration, I struggle to…