Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2018 i The Writer

Twitter may have earned its reputation as a cesspool for trolls and virtual shouting matches, but light does spring forth from the darkness on occasion. A few months ago, a hashtag began making the rounds in the writing community on Twitter: #ShareYourRejections. The response was shocking. Did you know that the great Roxane Gay was rejected from Bread Loaf so many times that she stopped applying just three years ago? Poet Saeed Jones is another recipient of multiple Bread Loaf rejections, and he’s got a Pushcart Prize to his name. Acclaimed author Jason Reynolds has had 40-plus picture books rejected, novelist Jami Attenberg’s own publisher rejected a manuscript that went on to become a New York Times best-seller, and prolific YA/MG author Shannon Hale received so many rejections for her…

In many writers’ journeys, crafting a book proposal or query letter is a necessary step to become a paid and published author. But drafting one can be overwhelming, especially when books offering advice don’t even agree on how many sections are needed: For nonfiction proposals alone, I’ve seen six, nine, or 10. However, all the advice I’ve seen does say that writers need an analysis of the market or comparative titles. (OK, there’s also no consensus on where it goes in the proposal, but I digress.) In a May 2012 issue of The Writer, Marilyn Allen and Coleen O’Shea explained the three- to five-page “about-the-market” section “highlights demographics and qualitative data to demonstrate an existing, targeted audience for your project; emphasizes your book’s distinguishing elements; and identifies and evaluates competitive…

Fiction must capture our attention, and it must hold it. Stories or novels that fail to do this make us close the book and move on to works that do. So what keeps our interest in fiction? Compelling characters certainly; a well-delineated setting that places us in the world of the protagonist; and a plot that moves – but don’t forget language that charms us, grips us, and makes us see, as Joseph Conrad famously said: “My task which I’m trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything.” Bottom line: Language is the indispensable tool of the author. Music balances sound…

My occupant left me yawing wide today, banging in the autumn winds, my acanthus doorknocker pocked with rain. She has been doing this often of late. It was not enough, apparently, leaving me unlocked and then ajar. Now I must yaw. At first I reasoned she was distracted by familial woes, by clients wanting an impossible renovation: farm to hotel, condo to castle. But no. She is spearheading a movement that calls for our annihilation. Destroy the doors! Such is her battle cry in those magazines of Hearth and Home. Change not the locks. Change these archaic concepts that enforce enclosure and compartmentalization. What nonsense. What wordy rot. This is exactly doorness: Enclosure. Compartmentalization. She writes as if we have a secret nefarious agenda, as if we are a cabal…

Indigenous people once referred to the land that makes up North America as “Turtle Island,” before Europeans renamed it for explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Turtle Island Responds is an online poetry series under the auspices of Room Magazine, in which people from marginalized communities across the continent reflect on events from the current news cycle. Edited and curated by Métis/Icelandic poet and author Jónína Kirton, the series welcomes original poems by both emerging and established cis and transgender women, trans men, Two-Spirit, and non-binary people writing in response to the current news cycle. ‘In a sense, a lot of the news we get is sanitized – even the good news,” she says. “It’s coming from one point of view. It’s time we started hearing from people within marginalized communities, and not…

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 »CONTESTS P AUTUMN HOUSE CHAPBOOK CONTEST Formerly the Coal Hill Review Chapbook Contest. Submit 12-20 pages of poetry by email or regular mail. Final judge of the competition is Gerry LaFemina. Deadline: Nov. 1. Entry fee: $20. Prizes: Publication and $1,000. Contact: Autumn House Press, 5530 Penn Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15206. info@autumnhouse.org coalhillreview.com F THE BIG MOOSE PRIZE Submit unpublished novel through online submission manager…

All writing is founded in memory, no matter what kind. If you’re a fan of personal essays, then you’re almost certainly familiar with Sloane Crosley. Her first two essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number, were both New York Times best-sellers, and the former was selected as a finalist for the Thurber Prize in American Humor. Her latest collection of essays, Look Alive Out There, was chosen earlier this year as an Amazon Book of the Month. Earning comparisons to essay superstars like David Sedaris and Nora Ephron, Crosley’s work is relatable and wry. With Look Alive Out There, Crosley delivers a collection that contains a spot-on balance of humor, poignancy, and stellar observations about everyday life alongside more serious topics. Although…

Next Line, Please By David Lehman Every Tuesday, Best American Poetry series editor David Lehman challenges poets – both renowned and unknown – to write a poem following a certain set of restrictions as part of “Next Line, Please,” his interactive poetry column on The American Scholar website. Lehman’s column attracted a significant following, and now we have Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers, a compilation of “Next Line, Please” prompts from 2014-2016. The resulting book of poetry prompts aims to provide “a masterclass in writing in form and collaborative composition.” The Thorn Necklace: Healing Through Writing and the Creative Process By Francesca Lia Block “I’ve written to transform pain, to save my mind from its incessant loopings, to save my life,” writes award-winning fiction author and memoirist…

Careful readers will note that Nat Sobel helped launch the careers of several writers mentioned in this article. In fact, he published an essay in Eureka Literary Magazine, “A Literary Agent Reads the Reviews,” about his decades-long practice of reading literary journals to find new talent, citing such payoffs as these: ➺ “In 1991, I started to read James Carlos Blake’s novella, ‘I, Fierro,’ in Quarterly West on a subway train going uptown for a lunch meeting. I got so involved in this story that I missed my stop and almost didn’t care.” ➺ “F.X. Toole’s story ‘The Monkey Look’ was an instant grabber. Who could resist the speed and punch of the opening lines as they appeared in Zyzzyva?” ➺ “When I read the opening two paragraphs of Laura…

It may seem like the diversity conversation has been a backdrop of the literary world forever, but it’s really a relatively young one. The VIDA count, which measures gender disparity in publishing, didn’t begin until 2009. In 2014, it began measuring ethnic disparity. And it wasn’t until 2014 that #WeNeedDiverseBooks started trending on Twitter, giving rise to the movement that has been changing children’s literature. And yet it’s always been at the forefront for some people. One of those groups is literary magazine editors who are diverse themselves. (I myself, a first-generation immigrant, edit fiction at Tahoma Literary Review.) For this story, I spent some time with other diverse editors of literary magazines to see how they thought our field was doing in terms of ensuring that under-represented voices are…

What inspired you to write “Doors?” I teach creative writing (see luminousedits.org for more), and one of the assignments I give my students is to write from a non-human POV – object, ghost, tree, etc. It’s a terrific exercise to force you to think outside your own experience. It’s fun, too. That’s what I say, but have I ever done it myself? Nope. So I did! And here it is. This story features perhaps the most unique protagonist we’ve ever published. How was writing from the perspective of household objects different than writing a human protagonist? How did you know when you had found the right “voice” for your main character? In some ways, finding the “voice” was fairly straightforward. The door would use household metaphors and analogies: “built like…