An interview by Alicia Cole. A singer-songwriter and poet from Atascadero, California, Ephraim Scott Sommers is the author of The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (Tebot Bach 2017), winner of the 2016 Patricia Bibby First Book Award….
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: 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: 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: 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…
Guest Post: On Finitude by Thomas Snarsky
I remember getting a copy of Robert Frost’s Collected Poems when I was a senior in high school. I didn’t read much poetry at the time, but I remember taking the book with me as my only company for a…
Guest Post: The Guest Poet by Kevin Casey
We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest. — Horace The bathroom remodel is coming along fine, and thanks for…
Guest Post: Loving-Kindness for Writers by Jessica Demarest
Confession: I’m obsessed with yoga. I took my first yoga class three years ago, and I’ve been hooked ever since. As obsessions usually do, my yoga practice has seeped into my everyday life in more ways than one. More often…
Guest Post: Why Some People are Still Afraid of the ‘L’ Word by Lyndsey Ellis
I remember the first time I had the guts to tell someone I wanted to be a writer. I was a sophomore in college. At the time, my horrible grades in math weren’t enough to help me transition into one…
Guest Post: A-merica, our home and native land… by Garreth Chan
I spent two months of my summer entangled and confused in an endless jungle of a fantastically exotic city. Glass and cement twisted into a permanent tango, childish handwriting in chalk emblazoned across uneven sidewalks, slowly scrubbed away by the…
Guest Post: Fantastic Voyage: The Phenomenon of Human Emotion – Part II by Dr. Jodi De Luca
Life within itself is a fantastic voyage. And during this journey of our lives, more often than not we can unexpectedly find ourselves hurled into un-chartered territory, especially where emotions are concerned. Perhaps the fact that we can’t ‘see’ our…
Guest Post: Inner Structures by Seth Jani
At twenty-eight I have quietly, and without much explaining, maneuvered my life into a position where I can easily focus on writing. This means I currently work a slightly-better than minimum-wage service industry job with limited hours and as few…