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: 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: 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: 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: 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…
A Conversation with Tobi Alfier
An interview by Alicia Cole. Tobi Alfier is a multiple Pushcart nominated poet and Best of the Net nominee whose poems have appeared in The Chaffin Journal, Chiron Review, Gargoyle, Hawai’i Pacific Review, The Los Angeles Review, Spoon River Poetry…
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: Impeaching White Jesus: Recreating Poetry in Nigerian Literature by Shoola Oyindamola
In poetry and literature, I am most critical of the languages, styles, and techniques that many upcoming Nigerian writers employ these days. Because some of these writers do not have concrete foundation in poetry written by their own ancestors, it…
Guest Post: Why poets write stage plays by Doug Van Hooser
The most obvious reason would be because I went to a play the other night and there were only eight people in the audience. The capacity of the theater is between forty and fifty depending on the size of the…
Guest Post: Stained by Jordan Abbruzzese
“Oh God. Do I have brown all over the back of my pants?” I spun around clumsily, my supervisor’s eyes wide. I had just torn into some chocolate from the jar at reception’s desk and dropped some on my new…