Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 i The Writer

Certainly the very best thing we can do for our writing careers is to commit to writing every single day. Of course, we’d also read for pleasure, exercise for 30 minutes, walk 10,000 steps, eat plentiful heapings of green vegetables, and never lose our temper, succumb to lesser emotions, or sit for hours at a time – all while holding down a full-time job, no less. In a perfect world, all of these things would happen. In real life, however, something’s gotta give. And I sympathize greatly with readers who confess sometimes it’s writing that falls on the chopping block. Sometimes, too, the creative well runs dry for a spell, and writing sessions seem to yield little result. If you find yourselves struggling to meet daily writing goals, one thing…

“Writing is frustration – it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.”—Philip Roth WARNING: The following quiz is a powerful scientific tool that’s to be used only with extreme care. Our research team has performed extensive longitudinal studies on the following questions and answers such that the results are guaranteed to be 100 percent accurate.* *Except if they’re not. So with that in mind, read on and see if you’ve got what it takes to be a writer today: QUESTION 1: Are you hooked on any of the following? a. Coffee. b. #2 pencils. c. T-shirts that say things like “Lit Happens!” d. Thesaurus.com. ✓ Give yourself 122 points for each answer. ✓ Add 1 point if you worried that one of the answers was…

Experiences need not be extraordinary to be interesting. The editors of the Michigan State literary nonfiction journal Fourth Genre point out that the stuff of everyday life – “a train whistle, a snow fall, the smells of a mother’s cooking – often hold the key to unlocking extraordinary insight into family, culture, personal history, place, and time.” Most of us, published or not, will not attract biographers’ interest, so it will be up to us to tell our tales, whether for mass consumption or simply as a record to hand down to our family. Who would not like to catch the precious moments of their lives and preserve them as insurance that they will not be lost to posterity? And as Dorothy Allison, author of Two or Three Things I…

Barking Sycamores – magazine edited by transgender, queer neurodivergent people of color, seeking poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, book reviews, and hybrid genre pieces. Submit online via website. neurodiversitymatters.com/barkingsycamores The Mighty – Publishes essays, investigative articles, and blog posts related to disability, disease, and mental illness. community@themighty.com, themighty.com Wordgathering – Seeks poetry, essays, book reviews, interviews, and fiction relevant to disability in literature. submissions@wordgathering.com, wordgathering.com The Deaf Poets Society – Seeks poetry, prose, reviews, interviews pertaining to people with hearing impairments and other disabilities. thedeafpoetssociety@gmail.com, deafpoetssociety.com New Mobility Magazine – Editors look for unusual and quirky essays and powerful service articles that embrace the active wheelchair lifestyle. Submit via website. newmobility.com Monstering – Publishes writing, artwork, and audio-visual pieces by disabled women and non-binary people. submissions@monsteringmag.com, monsteringmag.com…

Writing can be a lonely venture. Our time is spent in our heads creating the perfect sentences, paragraphs, poems, and stories. Minutes and hours slip by as we get lost in our own world or agonize over a single word or phrase. As much as we love it, there’s always a push and pull. Some days we claw our way to our writing space, knocking over anything that gets in our way so we can sit down and let our words flow. Then there are the days in which we find ourselves cleaning the grime from our ovens instead of writing. Then add the business side: Finding an agent, dealing with publishers, querying magazines, promoting books, pondering whether to self-publish, updating social media and websites…the list goes on and is…

“As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.”—Dani Shapiro MY HUSBAND IS AN ARTIST, and I am a freelance writer, and there’s a lot of chatter in our house about our careers. What do we need to get done that day or that week? Where would we like to be by next year, or five years from now? Occasionally we talk about other artists and writers we know, some of whom are having great success, and some of whom should be but aren’t. Over time, we’ve started to see some patterns in how we and others think about and approach creative work, and we realized there are some common myths that, if not challenged, can impede or completely derail a career. Read on to discover…

AS a fiction writer, what do you write about? Perhaps an incident you saw on the news. Perhaps an experience a friend had. Or perhaps a story you heard and just have to tell. Probably you’ve been told to “write about what you know,” or at least know it well enough to get deeply into your protagonist and make your story live, breathe, and have a strong air of reality about it. So what do you know? You know yourself – that’s what you know. Maybe, like most people, you are a bit self-delusional at times (you are human, after all), but you probably know yourself better than anyone else knows you. Because you are the one who has lived your story. And so you decide to write about that.…

Ann Garvin and Kathy MacMillan provide advice: GARVIN’S ADVICE: • Grow slowly • Be clear about why you are doing [this] so you can communicate that to the people coming in • Pick people who have skills that you don’t have in order to spread out the workload for everyone. MACMILLAN’S ADVICE: • We did not actively recruit. We felt that we wanted people who really wanted to be here. So, having them find us and applying was a big part of that. • We developed very simple, clear criteria for membership and stuck to them. Other debut groups have gotten into hot water because they started making exceptions for some people but not others, but we have been strict about following our criteria, and that has saved us lots…

I magine you are obsessed with your grandmother. She emigrated from Ireland at the age of 15 and then labored to earn money to bring over her 10 brothers and sisters. Or perhaps she came to this country and invented a new type of paper clip. Or maybe she was a bit more rambunctious and had an affair with a local politician. Her illegitimate daughter is now considering a run for Senate. Perhaps she did all three! You find yourself thinking about your grandmother’s story all the time. Talking to people about her. Jotting down notes. Sometimes you sit at the computer and research her hometown. You want to write something about her, but what? A novel? A memoir? A biography? Maybe a poem? How do you decide what form…

Freelance writer and blogger Melissa Blake was 25 years old and just out of journalism school when she published her first essay about having a disability, in Redbook magazine. In the piece, she wrote about being born with Free-man-Sheldon syndrome, which causes shortened muscles and bones, and described several of the almost 30 surgeries she endured before she graduated from high school. “I was born with clubbed feet and hands, a deformed face with an unusually small mouth and low-set ears, severe scoliosis, and knees that were bent back to almost 90 degrees,” she wrote. Blake found it thrilling to see something she wrote available on newsstands, and the feedback from readers – especially those with Freeman-Sheldon syndrome – encouraged her to keep writing. Since then, Blake has published pieces…

DeWitt Henry: “Do the details add to the thrust of the story? Beware details for details’ sake and for the lure of remembering. Will the details matter to readers who don’t know the writer’s life? Will inclusion of the details betray, insult, or slander any private party, including the writer her or himself?” Jack Remick: “Don’t be intimidated if you stretch beyond ‘what really happened.’ Seek out the significant detail that defines character, intensifies the situation, and locates the depth of the object.” Dennis Must: “When referencing autobiographical details in your narrative, remember you are a fiction writer and not a reporter. One’s imagination must come into play.” Melissa Pritchard: “Examine your motives for writing autobiographically based fiction – write from a place of nonjudgment, not revenge. Fiction addresses emotional…

Blanket Sea is free to access and charges no submission fees so that writers and artists can approach editors without financial constraints. As a writer diagnosed with mental and chronic illnesses, Alana Saltz has spent a great deal of time in online communities for people living with disabilities. There, she’s met artists and writers hungry for venues in which to showcase their creative work. “I noticed a great deal of them were facing barriers in terms of rejections due to their work being considered too ‘niche’ or because of prohibitive submissions fees,” she notes. In response to this need, she launched Blanket Sea – a monthly digital publication that showcases writing and art from those living with chronic illness, mental illness, and/or disability. The magazine is free to access and…

“What I wrote was deeply triggering for me, but I couldn’t arrive at the place I am now if I didn’t see on the page what happened to me.” Before it was even published, Terese Mailhot’s debut memoir Heart Berries made several appearances on impressive lists of the most anticipated books of 2018. The New York Public Library, the Huffington Post, “The Rumpus,” Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, and others praised Mailhot’s writing for its rawness and stunningly beautiful prose. Mailhot has emerged as a leading voice in modern Native American writing. She received her MFA in fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), which is the first MFA program in the United States to focus on Indigenous writers. She originally tackled difficult subject matter (abuse, mental health issues, poverty,…