Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i The Writer

Surely an editor should love all of her editorial children the same, but I confess the April issue holds a special place in my heart. It’s the month this magazine was founded, way back in 1887. It’s the month Shakespeare was born (and also the month he died). And it’s National Poetry Month, which always makes my literary pulse quicken. I think I didn’t really fall in love with the written word until I discovered poetry. Oh, I was a voracious fiction reader as a child, but it was Poe, Tennyson, and the Bard who revealed all the tricks the English language has up its sleeve. I once checked a book of Carl Sandburg poems out of the school library and was so horrified at the thought of returning them…

“You’re climbing Everest by looking down at your feet, not looking up at the mountain. The second I look up, I wouldn’t be able to breathe, and it would all be too daunting.” Clara Bingham’s nonfiction book Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law was adapted for the screen as the movie North Country, which starred Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Sean Bean, Woody Harrelson, and Sissy Spacek. She is the author of two other nonfiction books, Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress and most recently Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul. Bingham is also a prolific journalist. She worked as a reporter for Newsweek between 1989 and 1993, and her freelance…

Writers get so used to hearing “no” from editors that letting go of a bad gig sounds dangerous. It is not. Editors will not blacklist you; your life will not tumble into foreclosure. In my experience, when you bid adieu before you get screwed, work becomes more pleasant and profitable. Here are the biggest warning signs. Money issues Your rate goes down. Checks take forever to arrive, and your editor expresses disdain when you inquire over their whereabouts. (God forbid, the checks bounce.) Writers deserve to get paid without their livelihoods being threatened. Despite the doomsday accounts of dying markets and pivots to video and writing for exposure, you can find clients who will treat you like a human being and not as a cog in the perpetual content machine.…

Are you a two-genre writer? Fiction, say, and poetry too? If you are, you’ve surely noticed some advantages of working in two genres. If you’re not, and you’re drawn to either, give it a try. The two overlap quite a bit, and there are distinct benefits of writing both. First, when you write both fiction and poetry, you strengthen your ability to handle language. As a creative writer, you must find ways to place readers in your world. Certainly, as conscious creatures, we live in the world of the mind. But we also live in a world of the five senses. As readers, we like to be fully present, concretely there in the imaginative literature we read. If you work in both genres, you’ll have double the practice at placing…

IN 2005, I DEVELOPED A BAD HABIT. I was finishing up my communications degree after a six-year hiatus in the real world – I had left school for a radio career and, in the meantime, began freelancing. Even though I was in my mid 20s and had already earned a few bylines by the time I returned to the classroom, I longed to be part of the student newspaper. While there, I fell into a routine of emailing professors and peers questions. But then I took an oral history class – and, soon after contributed a storty to the local paper where I interviewed a man in his 80s about a would-be Pennsylvania river port that instead, tragically, became a ghost town soon after it hit the map. This story…

Information in this section is provided to The Writer by the individual markets and events; for more information, contact those entities directly. Subscribers to The Writer have online access to information on publishers, publications, conferences, contests and agents. Go to writermag.com and click on Writing Resources. F = Fiction N = Nonfiction P = Poetry C = Children’s Y = Young adult O = Other F N C Y 3 SEAS LITERARY AGENCY Represents romance, women’s fiction, YA and middlegrade fiction, and select nonfiction titles. Query by email only. No attachments. Contact: Michelle Grajkowski or Cori Deyoe or Linda Scalissi, 3 Seas Literary Agency, P.O. Box 444, Sun Prairie, WI 53590. 608-834-9317. queries@threeseaslit.com threeseasagency.com F N THE AARON M. PRIEST LITERARY AGENCY Seeks mainstream and literary fiction and narrative nonfiction.…

EXCERPT: STARSHINE & CLAY TO THEMA, ALMOST TWO YEARS AFTER YOUR BURIAL I don’t know their names& they don’t know yours,though your flesh nowof their flesh as a donor.I try not to get angryat strangers pressing too close,choosing kindness just in casethere’s a part of youbrushing by. What haveyour gorgeous, castaway eyesgifted another to see?I must have dined near what remainsof you, faithful organthriving in a bodyspending your hours, strolling pastmilestones you won’t reach. Your childrenplay around us, your laughinside tiny throats, holding their bodiesthe way you held yoursagainst fading light, letting music enter& move them alive. Alive! Your namesweet pepper burning your parents’ tongues,the spice of you fresh as the daythey brought you home.In lieu of flowers, this. Oh cousin,you know the deepest sacrifice—being a miracle is far from…

The essay begins nicely. It’s fabulously written, ostensibly about the way a young man feels having his life chronicled each week in his mother’s newspaper column. About three-quarters of the way through, the writer recounts an event that makes my ears prick up, something so significant that it gives the words and events in the pages before a new angle. And then he kind of just drops it. I can feel him physically dragging the essay back to what it was about before, trying to give due diligence to the narrative plan he’s laid out for himself. The essay holds my attention all the way through, but by the end of it, I’m feeling hungover, literally, because hangovers are accompanied by the sense that you know you did something last…

I had been in South Africa for only two weeks in 1996 when I landed an interview with the Godfather of Soweto. The moniker had double meaning, referring to both Godfrey Moloi’s early life as a gangster bootlegger and later role as social benefactor. After spending three years as a researcher in the D.C. bureau of a large British newspaper, I moved to Johannesburg to pursue my dream of being a real journalist. Once in town, I bluffed my way through an interview with the editor of the largest daily and persuaded him to let me write a feature about the luxurious homes of notable citizens. Another journalist in the newsroom suggested I include Moloi, so I added his name to the list but didn’t bother learning too much about…

It can be argued  that the hardest part of writing a book is actually sitting down to write it. You might have a Word document, a list written on a napkin, or even a mental note saved of a book you’re eager to write. There’s just one question stopping you: When is a good time to write a book – and how long will it take? You can write a book over the course of many years. Some successful authors have taken as long as 10 or 15 years to write their books. But it doesn’t have to take that long. In 2015, a publisher green-lit my proposal for my second book. I was over-themoon excited. I couldn’t wait to get started on the writing process, which I imagined would…

TESS GALLAGHER: “One of the things most helpful to my writing process is that I walk every day on both sides of a river. Having that in my day allows an expansive zone of walking meditation in which many thoughts, recognitions, and spirit connections come to me that might never do so otherwise. It is a kind of sacred time when I let myself take joy in birds and trees and the sound of the river.” JIM DANIELS: “Active verbs drive both poems and stories. Circle all your is/was/ were’s and see how many you can cut or replace.” JULIANNA BAGGOTT: “Let the poet in you pick the best image – only one where one will do just fine. The fiction writer will want to hold onto a bunch of…

Catapult’s tagline reads “launching remarkable writing.” With that goal in mind, a team of editors, designers, and illustrators maintains a publishing house as well as an ongoing series of writing classes, an open online platform for sharing and networking, and a daily digital magazine. Co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Koch explains on the organization’s website: “We created a storytelling zone with relatively few zoning laws, where the stories we publish in our daily magazine inspire stories you post in our Community section. Where Catapult Community members become Catapult class takers who become Catapult magazine contributors who, when it’s time to shop their manuscripts, maybe circle back to us.” Editors at the 2-year-old literary magazine have a particular passion for showcasing the work of emerging and marginalized writers. “It’s why I wanted…

The Business of Being a Writer By Jane Friedman Writing is an art, and writers can spend a lifetime honing their craft and still never feel like they’ve perfected it. But all the how-to books in the world won’t help you if you actually want to make a living off your passion. Enter Publishers Weekly columnist and mega-popular writing blogger Jane Friedman, who’s here to demystify the dollars-and-cents portion of the writing industry. “Learning about the publishing industry will lead to a more positive and productive writing career,” writes Friedman in The Business of Being a Writer. “While business savvy may not make up for mediocre writing, or allow any author to skip important stages of creative development, it can reduce anxiety and frustration. And it can help writers avoid…

IN Ashley Shelby’s Twin Cities home, climate change dominates household conversation. Her father is a retired investigative journalist and television anchor who devotes his days to climate activism. Her 10-year-old son is well-versed in concerns about fossil fuels and warming ocean temperatures. Shelby herself is the author of Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City, a book about one of the most dramatic floods in U.S. history, and a debut novel, South Pole Station. Booksellers categorize her novel, which follows a group of contemporary misfits living at the South Pole, as both humor and climate fiction. “You have to be eccentric to want to spend 12 months at South Pole Station,” Shelby explains. “Humor is what I use to face the difficult…

AS A FREELANCE REPORTER, I relied on the five Ws: who, what, where, when, and why. However, when an editor told me a submitted article seemed stiff and too business-sounding, my approach was challenged. “The goal is to make the reader feel like you’re sitting across from them, telling them the story – not reading it from a brochure,” she said. Excessive facts dominated the verbiage. As a result, the story was missing. I needed to set aside my clinical approach and figure out how to tell a story in the way it deserved to be told – all while preserving reality. Writing nonfiction became easier the moment I began to think like a fiction writer. After all, elements that make a story inviting are characters, desire, and conflict. Even…