The Writer April 2013

Ever since writers have produced manuscripts, they have searched for the Holy Grail of publication. While the process has rarely been easy and almost never comes with certainty, it also has never been quite so wily. Nor quite so exciting. This issue of The Writer looks at the process of writing from many angles: novels, poetry, plays, websites, biography, even tax forms. My favorite? Dana Gioia and Richard Blanco reveal their processes as poets – our tip of the hat to April as National Poetry Month and to our belief that poetry will always have a viable place in our cultural conversation. We also take a close look at authors who are borrowing techniques from the entertainment world to launch books through cross-pollinating with music, events and affinity groups. And…

Letter writing is an art. There are letters that are short and sweet, that almost verge on being memoranda. There are letters that are detailed and solipsistic, navel-gazing spill-it-all tomes that somehow bore and fascinate you at the same time. And of course there are the beautiful ones: carefully lettered cursive pieces, well thought-out, inked on expensive parchment, and lovingly pasted shut with a monogrammed sticker. Sometimes those letters smell like lavender, and sometimes they even have a fancy wax seal. But they are not art. I learned the (now dying) art of letter writing from my pen pal from Minnesota, Missy. I had connected with her by filling out a form in a magazine when we were about 10-or 11-years old. When I dropped that first letter in the…

Every month until April, which is National Poetry Month, volunteer poets will be engaging in a poetry marathon. To raise funds for Tupelo Press, a nonprofit literary press, each participant writes 30 poems in 30 days. In December, one poet accepted the challenge, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, and she exceeded the 30/30 goal, writing 31 poems in the 31 days of December. The next month brought a large crop of volunteers. Nine poets flexed their creative muscles in January to produce a poem a day. All the work is posted on the 30/30 project webpage (tupelopress.wordpress.com/3030-project). Poets can also volunteer for the upcoming months of the project by emailing publisher@tupelopress.org with a brief bio and three sample poems. Here are two poems from day one of the January project. In the…

Ernesto Quiñonez The New York Times called Ernesto Quiñonez’s acclaimed debut novel Bodega Dreams a “new immigrant classic” and selected it as a notable book of the year. Several high schools and colleges around the U.S. feature it on syllabi. Bodega Dreams and Quiñonez’s follow-up novel Chango’s Fire both follow the struggles of characters in and around the housing projects of El Bario (New York City’s Spanish Harlem), where Quiñonez grew up. Quiñonez is an associate professor of Cornell University’s MFA program. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek and elsewhere. What is the most important lesson you’ve learned about writing? THAT I MUST CONTINUE to treat it with discipline and respect, otherwise two months turn into 10 years, and I have not written anything. If…

I could feel the words spilling from my head, evaporating out of my ears. When I spoke, “tambourines” mixed with “trampolines.” Phrases such as “parking meters” became “that thing you put money into,” and the names of my favorite novels disintegrated. My brain was fried. If you’re a writer with a full-time job, you know the feeling. You spend long work hours juggling numbers and orders and lists, then siphon your brain clean on nights and weekends. You fill your mind with story ideas and dialogue, only to vacuum it out again come Monday morning. Your head becomes a pile of mixed-up mush. It’s essential to keep your writing brain sharp despite the pressures of work and everyday life. Here are some quick tricks to keep your mind fit and…

THIS DISCUSSION IS still in progress-and probably will be for some time to come-so the boundaries are not clearly marked. Still, many seem to agree that possibility is a determining factor. Science fiction explores what is possible (even if it’s improbable), while fantasy explores the impossible. Of course, possibility comes with some measure of subjectivity. which complicates matters. Let’s turn to Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 45! and The Martian Chronicles, and a writer in both genres. He described science fiction this way: “Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together,... Science fiction is a logical or mathematical projection of the future.” Fahrenheit 451 describes an America where people are consumed by media, and…