Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2018 i The Writer

As a former food editor (and current food-obsessed writer), I make frequent pilgrimages to so-called Good Restaurants. When one goes to enough Good Restaurants, one eventually learns to speak the language fluently; she can bandy about terms like house-made, artisanal, locally grown, and grass-fed without batting an eye. Is the tartare hand-chopped? one asks the server. And the kimchi shaved ice, is that made with house-fermented cabbage? But one term that never seems to come up at Good Restaurants is fun. No one ever says the dry-aged ribeye or fried sweetbreads are “fun.” Locally sourced or humanely raised, certainly. But fun? Please. This is serious artisanal food; fun need not apply. Last summer I had the pleasure of visiting a Boston restaurant that played anime on loop and served icy…

WHALE RESTED ▸ Add some nautical flair to your reading chaise with this Moby Dick-inspired pillow. It’s emblazoned with classic words from Herman Melville: “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” $29.99. Society6.com. ▸ TRAGEDIES LOVE COMPANY Did someone suggest you pick up The Fault in Our Stars? Is it almost time for your annual re-reading of Where the Red Fern Grows? Run, don’t walk, to buy this literary tissue box. Your tear ducts will thank us. $24.99. Amazon.com. ▸ BETWEEN THE COVERS These bookish bookends aren’t just pretty to look at: They also boast four tiny hidden compartments tucked inside the covers. $39.99. Amazon.com ▸ COZY CANDLES Why merely read Jane Austen when you can breathe Jane Austen? Paddywax’s line of Library Collection candles take…

The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house. It stormed the night before over much of the southeast, flash floods on the news, trees snapped in half and pictures of trailer homes twisted apart. Larry, forty-one years old and single, lived alone in rural Mississippi in his parents’ house which was now his house, though he couldn’t bring himself to think of it that way. He acted more like a curator, keeping the rooms clean, answering the mail and paying bills, turning on the television at the right times and smiling with the laugh tracks, eating his McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken to what the networks presented him and then sitting on his front porch as…

At first glance, the topic of rhetoric doesn’t inspire a belly laugh. Still, when professors Elizabeth Losh and Jonathan Alexander wrote the script for their comic book Understanding Rhetoric, they found themselves guffawing over bottles of wine in Alexander’s kitchen, reading aloud in the voices of the characters they’d created and playing around with sight gags that would help university students speak and write more effectively. Undergraduate composition students have responded with gratitude. “Often, teachers will assign books in writing classes that don’t get read because people feel like they’re there to write,” Losh explains. “But students have been extremely positive about the book. It’s nice to hear that they actually read it.” Vibrant illustrations explode from the pages of Understanding Rhetoric. The authors become comic narrators, explaining the principles…

A writer is basically a storyteller, said Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. On my bookshelves, I have many books of advice that focus on formulaic elements of fiction – plot, conflict, character development, and such. But story is much harder to pin down. As Flannery O’Connor famously said, “I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.” As an editor and indie-press publisher, I encounter many submissions that have decent plots, likable characters, required conflict, and all that. But the manuscripts have a fatal problem: The storytelling is poor. These works are headed for the rejection bin. Beginning writers often believe that the plot is the clever thing that a writer does, and so they craft intricate…

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 THE WRITER SHORT STORY CONTEST Regularly hosted by The Writer magazine. Max 2,000 words. Submit via online portal only. Deadline: Check website. Entry fee: $25 for first entry, $15 for every additional entry on the same transaction. Prizes: First place receives $1,000 and publication in The Writer magazine. Second place receives $500 and publication on The Writer website. Third place receives $250 and publication…

Right about the time I couldn’t tell if my eyes stung from sweat or tears, when I tried to wipe whatever it was away and left a streak of Rust-Oleum across my forehead, I realized that I made a mistake. Not about the Rust-Oleum, which was labeled as a primer for heavily rusted metal. The railing I worked on was, indeed, heavily rusted. No, the mistake was my chosen listening material. I use audiobooks to eat up the time it takes to get from point A to point B of boring tasks like long road trips, long marathon training runs, and long bouts of depositing sweat equity into my house to get it ready to put on the market. For the front railing, I’d listened to Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The…

Sending your work to a literary magazine or online journal for consideration is not for the fainthearted. The outcome can feel as random as a coin toss: Heads you’re accepted for publication, tails you’re not. When you’re on a submissions streak, optimism fuels every story and cover letter, but that high wears off once the rejections roll in. In theory, you’re not supposed to take it personally. In reality, you do. You ruminate, agonize, second-guess. Was that opening too weak? Did I miss by a comma or by a mile? The standard response provides few clues. You’re left wondering: What do “they” want? Why didn’t my piece make the cut? Want answers? You can get them by reading other people’s work – not the stuff that’s published but the stuff…

If you’re a genre writer, do you pin down exactly what you’ll write beforehand: romance, mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, horror? Many writers do; their genre is their brand. But this isn’t true of every writer who writes a book that falls into a particular genre. Maybe their novel shifts toward science fiction as they write it. Maybe, as their imagination runs full steam ahead, they find they’re writing horror. If you find yourself writing such a novel, how closely should you pay attention to traditional conventions of that genre? Can you still find success if you depart from typical genre conventions as needed to tell a good story? And, finally, what’s all this fuss about literary genre novels: Literary thrillers, literary sci-fi? Literary historical novels? What makes these so-called “literary-genre hybrids”…

Two men standing at the lamppost glared at her. She sucked at the cigarette, leaned back, and blew out a gorgeous geyser of white. She sat down on the bench and studied the city roses on the bush, red and turning in the wind like little wheels…. There had been a string of afternoons Elsa lay in bed smoking, staring out the window at the crowds on the street, willing him to appear. Then her longing for him grew barbed. How could he allow her to worry like this? How could he leave her with so little cash? She had begun to worry only when she saw the buds on the trees. Since then sightings of him teased her wherever she went. Going down the stairs of the train platform,…

⇒ Feynman by Jim Ottaviani ⇒ Oil and Water by Steve Duin ⇒ Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer by Alberto Ledesma ⇒ Everything Is Teeth by Evie Wyld ⇒ The March Trilogy by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin ⇒ Filmish by Edward Ross ⇒ Fun Home by Alison Bechdel ⇒ Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi ⇒ Science Comics: Bats: Learning to Fly by Falynn Koch ⇒ Maus by Art Spiegelman ⇒ American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang ⇒ El Deafo by CeCe Bell ⇒ District Comics: An Unconventional History of Washington, D.C., edited by Matt Dembicki ⇒ Palestine by Joe Sacco ⇒ My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf ⇒ Older Than Dirt: A Wild but True History of Earth by Don Brown and Michael Perfit ⇒ The Forgotten Man: A…

John Haggerty, founding editor of the 2-year-old literary magazine The Forge, worries about people who are forced to abandon their writing because of careers and family. To encourage and showcase their talents, he and his fellow editors launched the 2018 Forge Fellowship for writers over 50 years old. Winners receive $500 and the opportunity to read and edit for the magazine over a year. Forge editors offer a separate fellowship to a writer of color. “We decided upon the two initial Fellowship categories because we want to be more active agents in encouraging and facilitating diversity in the literary community,” they note on their website. Volunteer editors from the international writers’ forum “Fiction Forge” contribute their vision to this digital publication. A rotating selection of editors chooses one piece of…

1. Blind submissions are called such for a reason. If the contest you enter is one of them, make sure your name and other vital details don’t appear anywhere in the submission file. This includes: cover page, title line, and header/footer. Online submission managers have their own ways of identifying you – trust that they will work. 2. Be sure your submission is within the specified word count. Judges may be willing to let 10 or 20 extra words slide, but if you’re more than that, definitely make cuts. 3. Stick with the theme of the contest you are entering, if there is one. If you are on the fence over whether your story can be interpreted in just the right way to fit the theme, rethink the submission. Others…

Leslie Jamison’s latest book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, published in April 2018, mixes journalistic reportage with memoir and literary criticism to explore the experiences of those who have recovered from addiction. Jamison is also the author of the novel The Gin Closet and the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times best-seller. She is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and her works have appeared in publications including Harper’s, Oxford American, The Believer, and elsewhere. Jamison is an assistant professor at Columbia University in New York City. WHAT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU’VE LEARNED ABOUT WRITING? I used to believe that the best writing had to emerge from a life that had been carefully sculpted to produce the perfect conditions for creativity: long…

I can’t write every day. Writing is hard. It’s thankless. Only a few good hours exist to crank out quality sentences – usually on the day the electric bill is due or when the internet is on the fritz. Since freelance writing is a business, what you do daily should improve the business. Writing is part of that, of course, but it’s a solitary, personal endeavor – what’s on the page comes from you. Some distance is crucial. Enter the important concept of parallel work, a phrase I first heard from my writer pal A.C. Shilton, which buoys your personal and professional self. Most importantly, it gets you in the mood to write. Here is what to do to shake things up without losing precious momentum. 1 Change location, find…

Concrete can rot. It turns green and black before crumbling away. Maybe only people from Congo know that. There was a time when I didn’t notice that sort of thing. When I was a little girl living here, it was a country of year-round greenery, of birds streaming color across clear skies. Then, when I was eight, I left to live with my dad in America, and ever since then coming back to stay with my mom each summer meant descending into the muggy and dangerous back of nowhere. The fountain in downtown Kinshasa, which I’d once thought of as the height of glamour, now looked like a bowl of broth. Bullet holes had appeared up and down it, and no one I asked could remember who had put them…

Eliot Schrefer: “I often advise my YA writing students to cut their first five, 10, 50 pages, and start the story wherever the high-octane material begins.” Audrey Niffenegger: “It’s always about people, no matter what sort of story you are telling. Create convincing people, and then see what sort of story they want to be in.” Tom Franklin: “Read and read everything. Not just in your genre.” Rene Steinke: “If you’re including a well-known historical figure, make sure that figure feels credibly ‘alive’ by fully imagining your own version of that character.”…

EXCERPT: “THE FIFTH WALL” Sam’s Tackle Box was wall-to-wall merchandise, packed so tight it fooled most customers into thinking that everything for sale was already on display. But Elana Hall wasn’t fooled. Though the store stunk of bait and brine, she could still catch the sour odor of methamphetamine, which Sam himself cooked regularly in a well-vented room above the sales floor. Elana came to the Tackle Box with her daughter Jeanette every week, though neither had much affection for fish. Still, the kid went wild in the place, and broke away from her mother as soon as they passed through the door. Elana, troubled and aching, paused next to an arrangement of musky lures and watched her go. Weren’t children’s senses supposed to be more acute than adults? Shouldn’t…