Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2016 i The Writer

"Poetry is an act of peace." –Pablo Neruda maya @8thrhythm on silence between notes colors of why #haiku acbetekhtin @acbetekhtin this year will leave without tears, as it always has/a lover without remorse #poetry Jumesto @TerzaVerse What’s not written in the lines is the blur I see in; too close to focus, too far away to clarify. #micropoetry Alexandra Meehan @LexMeehan As I listen In my forest The animals My closet Chopin A circus Black porpoise Spurting Darkness #micropoetry #poem Christopher Pollard @iconoduly winter night wearing a dead man’s coat #haiku #poem #poet #winter #dead #coat #Oklahoma…

"Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose." –Zora Neale Hurston I am writing a nonfiction book about a trial recently in the news. I have done thorough research and know the characters well. I want to share the feelings, thoughts and motivations of my characters based on that research. I am getting some resistance from fiction writers, who admonish me to be transparent in what they call speculation. My thinking is that the research informs my writing, and the reader will understand my sources by the time they have read the entire book. Am I wrong about this? A work of nonfiction that dramatizes events, as it seems your book does, often takes liberties. Conversations, for example, may not be recalled exactly, but are crafted…

I’ve been a poet since I turned 17 and fell into the habit of scribbling angst-ridden verses in a journal. Even after I’d gone to graduate school to study creative writing, I wrote confessionally about my childhood in a working-class Italian American family in Buffalo, New York. As the only male, I was expected to carry on the family name. Such a birthright came with many rewards, but expectations, too, which I also wrote about. In these first poems, I tried to be honest and leave nothing out. I wrote about my grandfather buying me a rifle and taking me hunting when I was 6. Other poems focused on teenage years, playing trombone – not very well – in the high school band and wearing the fanciest outfit I owned:…

Tell me the story of the mercury gilding of the dome at St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and do you remember the number of people who died and whether the vapors swayed with faintly human expression as they rose. The 400 kilograms of real gold, 4 bell towers, 40 tons of marble, 40,000 workers, 40 years’ construction. Each of the workers’ two hands, one pressed to the cold 140-ton red granite column, the other to his heaving chest. Can you give me directions to the Café Idiot? I have looked forward to lettuce, cucumber, tomato, orange, avocado, and nut. How many gallons of gray paint were necessary to hide the gold from the Nazis. Whether the men dropped off the dome or collapsed later in their homes. Whether it burned. If at…

Download the digital edition now to read Joseph Bathanti’s poem “My Father at the Montreal Musee des Beaux Arts.” Aprofessor of creative writing at Appalachian State University and former poet laureate of North Carolina, Joseph Bathanti writes both poetry and prose. In many ways, his endeavors as poet laureate were a continuation of the community-based work he has pursued for almost 40 years. Through his readings and workshops, Bathanti has delivered poetry and other forms of literature to marginalized populations that might not otherwise have been exposed to the form. These include prisoners, veterans, patients in hospitals and those in homeless shelters. His poetry has been largely inspired by his work in prisons. Inspiration also comes from life in rural North Carolina and from his working-class experiences in Pittsburgh, his…

NAME Katy Evans-Bush YEARS BLOGGING 10 GENRE Poetry, poetics, politics WEBSITE baroqueinhackney.com Download the digital edition now for more tips from Katy Evans-Bush. You say that Jane Holland told you to start a blog. What was her reasoning? Jane’s a friend of mine and an unstoppable workaholic. We were talking one day, about two years before my first collection came out. The subject of blogs came up, and she said, “Are you seriously trying to tell me you want to get published, and you don’t have a blog?” Back then, blogs were common enough, but they weren’t as mainstream as they are now. I just thought, yeah, she has a good point, and took my laptop to a café and started my blog. It all happened almost without me thinking…

• “Honesty catches my eye. Not necessarily saying raw things for raw purposes, but actually believing this writer has an experience outside of the piece of work at all.” —Dan Nowak, Editor, Imaginary Friend Press • “We often publish new writers, yet the primary criterion remains the same: Connect with the readers.” —Larry Smith, Director, Bottom Dog Press • “I look for poetry or fiction that walks that fine line between being too derivative and too outlandish. I love quirky, but I do want to be able to understand what I’m reading (though not necessarily on the first readthrough). I hate to admit it, but I am also attracted to clean writing without many grammatical problems.” —Jack Estes, Publisher, Pleasure Boat Studio…

Does Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, which was adapted as the movie Carol, keep its story promise? Download the digital edition now to find out. As a creative writing instructor, I often teach “tools over rules” to free students from what they “can” and “can’t” do in writing. Early on, I introduce “story promise,” or the point, usually in the first paragraph or page, when the writer gives the reader a promised direction or assertion of the story’s subject. If the story begins with a woman in a boat setting sail, as the reader, I assume this is where it’s going. Often, though, new writers begin in one place, and as they figure the story out, they take it somewhere else – the woman in the boat story might…

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED cross-cutting as a creative technique in a film studies class in college, in which we were instructed to pay close attention to the climactic montage in The Godfather that “cross-cut” between the baptism of Michael Corleone’s nephew and the murders of his enemies. As a stylistic device, the cross-cut (also known as parallel editing) is well suited to establishing tension in a film. The second time I thought about this creative technique was when I read Jack Myers’ exercise “The Cut-and-Shuffle Poem” from The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach, edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. In Myers’ exercise, he suggests writing out “two completely unrelated and emotionally opposite six- to tenline dramatic situations” and then, “as one might shuffle the playing cards…

Mary Jo Bang and I met at the Miami Book Fair last November. I had been reading her collection of poems The Last Two Seconds, the title of which intrigued me. I mean, that’s a title that captures it all. Even before I read the poetry in the book, I was thinking: All of life comes down to the last two seconds, right? What will you be, what will you see in those two seconds? I found the title both humorous and frightening. Bang studied sociology in college. She also worked as a photographer and a physician’s assistant. You can see that diversity in her poems – a broad sense of the world and a visual commitment. I was a latecomer to poetry. I studied it in college, all the…

The following listings are a sampling of what the industry has to offer. For a complete guide, visit writermag.com. Get up-to-date information on markets at writermag.com WriterMag.com Subscribers to The Writer have online access to information on publishers, publi- cations, conferences, contests and agents. Go to WriterMag.com and click on Writing Resources. Information in this section is provided to The Writer by the individual markets and events; for more information, contact those entities directly. F = Fiction N = Nonfiction P = Poetry C = Children’s Y = Young adult O = Other AGENTS C Y Adams Literary Represents chil- dren’s and YA authors and artists with picture books, middle grade and YA fiction. Submit via online submission form. Contact: Adams Literary. info@adamsliterary.com adamsliterary.com F N Y Andy Ross Agency…

Your blog has undergone many incarnations, as you note on your site. What has that process been like? Do you feel like you have finally found your footing? I’m not sure it’s quite as much a case of “finding my footing” as it is simply allowing the blog to grow and evolve along with my writing career. The blog was conceived as a means of growing that career and it has done very well. At the time – in 2006 – there wasn’t another blog out there doing what I wanted to do. The general shape of it was very clear in my mind: not a blog about writing poems, and certainly not a blog of my poems. In fact it was to be a blog about poetry in general…

Don Share is the editor of Poetry, one of the world’s most influential poetry journals. He has previously served as editor of Literary Imagination, poetry editor of Harvard Review and poetry editor of Partisan Review. He has published several books, including the poetry collections Wishbone, three poems from which were nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and Union, a finalist for the Boston Globe/PEN New England Winship Award. In addition to writing and editing poetry, Share translates it, and his translated collection of works by the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández received the Premio Valle Inclán Prize for Translation and the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize. His next book is a critical edition of the poems of Basil Bunting. WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON YOU’VE LEARNED ABOUT WRITING? Capaciousness. Sorry to use…

People change. Your perceptions of them change. You change. Write a scene that illustrates a relationship between two characters. Then, without bias, change that relationship. Focus on the moment of transformation, when one character experiences an illumination about another character – or about himself or herself in relationship to the other. How can you reveal the process of change? What key details create the moment as believable and relatable? Work to shine a light on the nuances of the emotions and behaviors that unleash new paths for the characters.…

1 HAPPILY-EVER-AFTER ALL THE TIME. If you’re keeping your characters safe, happy, in love, at the top of their game and living wonderful lives, there probably isn’t enough conflict. Refocus so that your story doesn’t grow stale. 2 RUNAWAY DIALOGUE. Look for places that the dialogue goes on a beat too long. Know when to end a conversation. Leave off greetings, introductions and goodbyes. Keep the discussion onpoint and working toward driving the promise of the story. 3 BECOME A REVISION SHARK. Find areas to revise and shorten scenes. Ask what doesn’t belong or what can be omitted to strengthen the story. What are the essential details? Sometimes while drafting a story, we think our readers won’t get something. That’s often because we don’t know what’s going to happen next…

Leaves are more than just leaves – arbitrary as the arbitrary letters that invoke them, the letters suspended, arranged; and, again, suspended like quivering arrows until bent for meaning like infinite sets collecting and scattering the infinite. Leaves are just that: leaves – matted in a gutter, not matted by the gutter and christened conceptual found-art, a good-bye some lame artist names “The Parts of its Sum,” not an island colonially clear-cut, not a snake eating its tail, not one anchored “A” damming the watershed of animus, not some eternal damning. Crosses are just that: crosses – electric chairs painted white; electric white like Good Friday is only white while the walls of the church, the white wile congregating in pews loses interest in the sermon. Congregating crows beyond the…

PARNESHIA JONES’ FATHER heard the name Parnassus in a movie and named his daughter Parneshia. Perhaps it has to do with being grandly named in her own right, but names stoutly mark Vessel, Parneshia Jones’ first published book of poetry: Muriel Rukeyser, O.W. Starling (grandfather), Marvin Gaye, Nazim Hikmet, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sara Ross (great grandmother), Anna Mag- nani, Mae West, Barack Obama. Naming and giving flesh to names are central to Jones’ poetry. The poet from Evanston, Illinois, burnishes Vessel with impeccable formalism, elliptical riffs and short works Such as "Haiku for Bernice, Louisiana": My father born here Bernice, Louisiana. Anyone seen him? Poetry editor of Triquarterly Books at Northwestern Univer-sity, Jones writes in many voices (“I am many different people. There are many different sides to all of us.”),…

CONTESTS P THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY Contest for book-length manuscripts of poetry (at least 48 pages). No restriction in content, style or subject. Submit via regular mail or online submission manager. Deadline: May 15. Entry Fee: $25 for post mail submissions; $27.50 for online submission. Prizes: $1,000 and publication by Lost Horse Press. Contact: The Idaho Prize, Lost Horse Press, 105 Lost Horse Lane, Sandpoint, ID 83864. losthorsepress@mindspring.com losthorsepress.org F N P LUSH TRIUMPHANT LITERARY AWARDS Submit in three categories: fiction (up to 3,000 words), creative nonfiction (up to 4,000 words) or poetry (suite of five related poems, 15 pages max). Submit via regular mail or online platform. Deadline: May 15. Entry Fee: $27.50 per entry. Prizes: First place in each category $1,000 and publication, first-runners up receive publication…

MY FATHER AT THE MONTREAL MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS I stroll into an alcove and there on a blunt onyx plinth sits my father, cross-legged, dozing, perfectly rendered in prefigurement hundreds of years ago. The modesty of the piece is typical of him, titled simply by the curators, or even the archaeologist who catalogued it at the excavation site: Seated Old Man. Described: Buff pottery with traces of pigment, Late classic Vera Cruz 600-1000. He wears the ceremonial cap, scars along the outsized ochre hands knotted in his lap. Earrings trumpet out of majestic ears. The long scimitar of the nose, lower lip reposed. Like coming upon his final reverie in the kitchen on Mellon Street, after he has eased from the bottom rung of the boom crane he’s been…

To contrast story openings that work, to alert the reader what’s to come, I set students up with homework in the way of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. Give it a try. To get to the story promise of Highsmith’s work, read the first chapter and answer the following questions, using examples from the book to support your answers: 1. What is the main character’s inner conflict? 2. What is the main character’s outer conflict? 3. Looking specifically at order of information, what details do you think needed to come earlier? Later? Any info that is lacking for you? 3.5 Are there details or threads that you think could be omitted? 4. Where does the plot/storyline meander too far for you? 5. Would you read on – why or…