Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i The Writer

I moved from Boston to rural Virginia this summer We’re talking no-trash-service rural. More-cows-than-people rural. Our-town-census-boasts-29-people rural. Yeah. That rural. I grew up in Pennsylvania farm country, and in so many ways I feel as if I’ve come home again. But the move also brings me back to my freelancing days. I work from home now instead of a noisy office, and my days are blissfully free of distractions. They’re also very quiet. I like quiet. No, I love quiet. But a whole lot of quiet can drive a person mad. So before I lose what precious few social skills I have, I’m trying to dust off the coping mechanisms that sustained me as a work-fromhome freelancer. I’m on social media more. I engage with writers more. I take my…

Immediate: Use a free tool to do an accessibility audit on your website. Get a handle on what you’re doing well, and what could use improvement. Try to use a screen reader or test out navigating your website only using a keyboard. Consider having people with accessibility needs try to complete some common tasks on your website, such as reading a story, filling out a form, or finding your contact information. Short-term: Starting with all new content, be more mindful of accessibility by adding proper tags to all forms, links, images, and other elements. Long-term: Go back and fix older archived content, if possible. Longer-term: If needed, update to a more accessible theme or content management system; most new readymade themes are built with accessibility in mind.…

In our August 2017 issue, we invited readers to submit their very own “micro-memoir:” a piece of flash nonfiction no longer than 200 words. Beth Ann Fennelly, our contest judge and author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, asked writers to look deep inside their own histories and “select an object with an unexpected powerful emotional charge and tell its story in one paragraph.” We promised to publish the winner in our December 2017 issue and were utterly delighted at the response. So delighted, in fact, that we felt it would be a shame to publish just one. Here are Beth Ann’s selections for the top micro-memoirs we received. The two first-place winners will receive a copy of Heating & Cooling, and all will receive a complimentary one-year subscription to…

The co-winners of our contest will each receive a copy of Beth Ann Fennelly’s new micro-memoir collection, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. “Morning: bought a bag of frozen peas to numb my husband’s sore testicles after his vasectomy. Evening: added thawed peas to our carbonara.” — from Heating & Cooling, “Married Love, IV” The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life’s challenges and joys. Some pieces are wistful, some wry, and many reveal…

NEW ENGLAND BOSTON UNIVERSITY Degree type: MFA in creative writing. MFA in playwriting also available. Concentrations: Fiction and poetry. Contact: Creative Writing Program, 236 Bay State Rd., Boston, MA 02215. 617-353-2510. crwr@bu.edu bu.edu/creativewriting BROWN UNIVERSITY Degree type: MFA in literary arts. Concentrations: Fiction, poetry, electronic writing (hypertext), and mixed media. Contact: Literary Arts, Box 1923, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912. 401-863-3260. writing@brown.edu brown.edu/academics/literary-arts EMERSON COLLEGE Emerson College, located in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts, is the nation’s premier institution in higher education devoted to communication and the arts in a liberal arts context. Degree type: MFA in creative writing; MA in publishing and writing. Concentrations: Literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Contact: Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, 120 Boylston St., Boston, MA 02116. 617-824-8610. Haley Bresnahan, 617-824-8750. haley_bresnahan@emerson.edu emerson.edu/academics/creative-writing-mfa GODDARD…

Successful freelance writers aren’t just good at their craft; they’re good at running a business. “They know what their numbers are, they know what their best markets are, they know how to promote themselves and their writing,” says Gwen Moran, a freelance business and finance writer. “If you don’t treat it like a business, it’s a terribly stressful, sporadic-paying way to make a living. You need to tend [to] all the elements that make any other type of business successful. You need to be sure you’re providing a quality service. You need to be sure that you’re innovating, and, in our case, that’s reinventing yourself and adapting to technology and developing new developing skills. You many need to become better at social media. You may need be able to put…

Screen readers: Software that “reads” a website to the visually impaired either out loud or via a braille display. Grading tools: Websites that evaluate a URL for potential problems, including search engine optimization (SEO), mobile device compatibility, usability, and accessibility. See “Resources & Tools” for specific accessibility grading sites. Alt tags or image tags: Descriptions that let both screen readers and search engines “read” an image. When users upload an image to a website, they are usually given a field to enter the alt tag. For example, a user might write “Dark, gloomy graveyard on a winter day” or “fresh-baked tray of blueberry muffins.” These descriptions won’t be visible on the website when viewed on a standard browser, but they’ll remain hidden in the coding. This not only allows screen…

FIRST PLACE “Dead Mother’s Corn Oil” by Diane Payne Long Distance Lover was happy I finally agreed to spend time at his dead mother’s cottage in the middle of nowhere. I already lived in the middle of nowhere. After making the 850-mile drive to spend a week or two with him at his house in a real town, with real things to do, I dreaded heading out to the place where he longed to retire. Ahh, her teapot wallpaper in the kitchen. Ooh, the moldy carpet in the living room. Woo, the surprising amount of kitschy lighthouses though we were nowhere near the lake. Then the biggest surprise. His dead mother’s old king-sized bed. I knew she died at home and hoped it wasn’t on this bed. “I remembered what you…

Once a writer sent a manuscript off to his editor without a speck of punctuation. His note explained, “I’m also sending you a bag of commas, periods, exclamation marks, and so on. You can put them wherever you like.” I don’t recall where I heard this story, but it captures the confusion we sometimes feel in the punctuation department. Not all writers are grammarians or punctuation experts; we write because we love to read, and we want to create the sorts of things we love reading. We handle the language by an ear trained through years of reading and punctuate the same way. So here is a quick review of some of the stickier situations. PERIODS According to William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, “There’s not much to be…

During her long career as a journalist, Julia Goldberg has published work in regional and national publications, and she has been the recipient of several journalism awards. For many years, she was the editor of the Santa Fe Reporter. She also served as the editorial chair for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. As a full-time faculty member in the creative writing and literature department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, she teaches nonfiction courses and is the faculty advisor for the student-run online publication, Jackalope Magazine Goldberg imparts her years of experience and knowledge to readers in her first book, Inside Story: Everyone’s Guide to Reporting and Writing Creative Nonfiction. Book versus article writing I’m used to writing finite pieces on deadline. With this, I had 8,000 words,…

Every writer gets them before acceptance comes along. Numbers of rejection letters vary – 60, 100, enough to paper the office. One wonders about the sanity of entering a profession with so much guaranteed gloom. Pursuing a writing life necessitates the development of coping skills. Even the most famous of writers tell rejection stories, beginning with their early days and sometimes continuing long after their names have become bigger than the titles on their books. Managing mechanisms vary. Trying to avoid the temptation to give it all up when one refusal follows another, I’ve discounted the idea of papering my walls with rejection letters as too depressing. Instead, I’ve turned the tables on the senders without their knowledge. I’ve developed a point-ranking system for editor letters and rate them from…

IN 2016, Anna Arnett of Chandler, Arizona, graduated with her Master of Arts degree in creative writing. This may not seem like news; after all, thousands of students graduate with an advanced degree in the subject every year. Arnett, however, had a powerful claim to fame. She was 92. Those who believe graduate school is reserved for people in their 20s should visit any Master of Fine Arts classroom across the country. The ages of students span decades – sometimes five or six decades. As adults consider mid-career changes and continue working long past what used to be considered retirement age, MA and MFA programs receive enrollment applications from parents with grown children and from grandparents, as well. Lori A. May is the author of The Low-Residency MFA Handbook: A…

There’s a wealth of web accessibility information available. Here are a few tools and places to learn more: WCAG – Web Content Accessibility Standards. w3.org GSA Government-wide Section 508 Accessibility Program. section508.gov a11y Project. a11yproject.com, Twitter hashtag #a11y WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. wave.webaim.org A Checker. achecker.ca/checker Site Improve (requires monthly fee.) siteimprove.com Another pro tip: Grymala suggested that lit mags housed in colleges could seek help from their libraries, who often have an accessibility expert on staff. He also suggested looking into local libraries, SCORE or other business mentoring chapters, or small business development centers that have experience with accessibility compliance.…

Why did you decide to use the second person POV here? What specifically do you think it added? I read a story in The New Yorker years ago that was in second person, and it immediately engaged me in a way I couldn’t forget. After that, I started noticing how rarely the “you” is used. While I can guess why – it can easily feel aggressive – that is a shame, precisely because it has so much power. It can point, or it can caress. Hunger” was feeling like a good fit for second person, so I gave it a whirl, and it was like stepping onto a rollercoaster. It immediately zoomed off with me and was so much fun to write that I’m using second person for the prelude…

“One of a Pair” by Sejal Shah A beach glass, sea-green earring, too pretty to discard. Copper green cupola, green of fountain pennies, of that statue, liberty, of bread mold, circles spiraling out. That green. St. Stephen’s of Hungary (once, Yorkville was Hungarian and Czech, Austrian and German, before it was home to girls in suits with swinging briefcases, talking on their phones, hair hanging like sheets of paper). I lost one earring and fashioned a pendant with the remaining one. Smooth green glass at my throat. But then I lost the other, lost the last, it slipped down the drain, where I had left it, the edge of the sink. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking; I was tired. It’s work to hoist your small, slim briefcase to work,…

You can’t find this in print. EXCERPT: INSIDE STORY: EVERYONE’S GUIDE TO REPORTING AND WRITING CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITING HABITS I began this chapter with a quote from John McPhee’s interview with the Paris Review. The magazine, since the 1950s, has regularly interviewed writers about their writing habits, techniques, and views on various aspects of literary craft and life. These make for fascinating reading and, as an added bonus, can suck away hours of your time! Why do we find it interesting to hear writers’ motivations for what they do and specifics for how they do it? Good question. Freud seemed to think writing was a way of recreating acts of fantasy from childhood, but he thought that about everything. Rather than focus on why, a few words on how seem appropriate.…