Innehållsförteckning för August 2015 från The Writer

MANY PEOPLE define their reading habits narrowly. You read novels. You read nonfiction. You read poetry. You read the newspaper. But I don’t know anyone who rules out short stories as an enjoyable and provocative way to spend a succinct period of reading time. “When you read a short story,” writes George Saunders – a formidable practitioner of the form – “you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.” Isn’t that key to just about all writing? You emerge from the world of the story more aware, more in love. I suspect each of this issue’s featured authors, including our “Ocean of Possibility” short story contest winner Graydon Megan, could get behind this philosophy when it comes to the reader’s…

“Of all the thousands of stories I’ve read over the course of a lifetime, the one that’s influenced me the most is Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Noon Wine’ from 1937. The cast of characters is remarkably vivid, as is the setting (a Texas dairy farm), and the drama, which turns violent near the end, has the scope of a modernday Greek tragedy. The story has one of the best comic villains ever seen in American literature, a character named Homer T. Hatch. The critic and novelist Reynolds Price compared this story to the work of Leo Tolstoy. It is simply one of the greatest stories ever written by an American. Both Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty learned from it. And so have I.” – Charles Baxter, There’s Something I Want You…

Shorts require immediacy; they’re a flicker of light in the darkness, a prick, a thunderclap. I have a theory about the variety of storytelling brains – brains wired with unique proclivities, strengths and weaknesses, as if from birth. There are “plot brains,” brains that immediately seize a character’s conflict and visualize the character bounding and zigzagging through a series of actions, overcoming obstacles and climbing toward a telling reversal or a poignant recognition. And then there are brains like mine that see a character mainly in a single situation, a dramatic one, certainly, but one that is as isolated as a scene from an Edward Hopper painting, unconnected from what’s next and perhaps even from what went before. I came to this realization when I started writing flash fiction several…

The drive to my mom’s house reminded me of just how much I loved the fall. The collage of orange and red leaves glowing in the sunlight always made me think of my childhood. I imagined myself playing in the orchards, running through the corn maze trying to lose my dad, eating candy corn, and picking out the biggest pumpkin I could find. It made me smile. I missed my dad. It had been a year since his death. In fact, two lifechanging developments had occurred within that last year: my wedding, then two days later the passing of my father. That was the reason I agreed to marry Kevin so quickly after his proposal in the first place. My father was ill and we all knew he didn’t have…

AUGUST1942 1942 IN LITERATURE Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, dies on April 24. •The New York Times publishes a national version of its best-seller list for the first time. •Salvador Dalí publishes his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. Time magazine proclaims the work “one of the most irresistible books of the year.” •Isabel Allende, Garrison Keillor and Michael Crichton are born. •Arthur Waley translates and publishes the 16thcentury Chinese novel Monkey by Wu Cheng’en. The book goes on to win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. The cold tip of Sam’s snub-nosed revolver digs into Madeleine’s back as he muscles her onto the ledge. She watches her cherryred pump, dangling tenuously from one foot, finally slip and fall to the pavement below.…

Write short. Write tight. That’s the mantra for getting published in anthologies, literary journals and magazines – and it’s a fantastic way to strengthen writing skills and build publishing credentials. Many publications are on the lookout for well-written short pieces, and knowing what they are specifically looking for can increase your chances of landing an assignment. Short personal stories are the mainstay for publications such as Chicken Soup for the Soul and Brevity. With more than 250 titles, the Chicken Soup for the Soul series has sold more than 110 million copies in the U.S. and Canada and more than 500 million worldwide, making it the best-selling trade paperback series of all time. Amy Newmark, publisher and editorin-chief, believes the books are still so popular because storytelling has always been…

I don’t remember every scene from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, but I’ll never forget my dissatisfaction with the final book’s ending. Loose ends everywhere! Motives unexplained! I had similarly strong reactions with the endings of the TV series The Sopranos (boo!), the film Toy Story 3 (hooray!) and Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado” (creepy, but wow!). The actual narrative details of these tales might have grown fuzzy over time, but the endings? The terrific ones (and the true stinkers) live on and on in my mind. The question that drives fiction is “What happens next?,” and endings don’t allow for any more “next.” Endings leave beloved characters in a space that needs to be satisfying, believable and reasonable for the story. Anything less, and…

CONSIDER THIS LINEUP OF CHARACTERS. Cathy, “queen of cats,” her house overrun with felines. Marin, “waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life”. Alicia, pulling out all the stops to get a university degree, despite her father’s objections. Earl, a jukebox repairman, with several boxes of 45 records and a series of women friends coming and going. Esperanza, the protagonist, who wants a house of her own, not her daddy’s, just hers, hers in every respect. These characters and others draw us into the sometimes raw, sometimes lyrical world of The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros’ 1984 debut novel. Through a series of vignettes, Cisneros creates a portrait of a mixed-race area in Chicago. In the course of the novel, Esperanza matures,…

Maya Angelou MAYA ANGELOU PAPERS 1958-1990 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Ray Bradbury BRADBURY MEMORIAL ARCHIVE The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, Indiana University Charles Bukowski CHARLES BUKOWSKI PAPERS USC Libraries Special Collections, University of Southern California Truman Capote TRUMAN CAPOTE PAPERS, 1924-1984 Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library E.E. Cummings E.E. CUMMINGS COLLECTION OF PAPERS, 1916-1962 The Berg Collection, The New York Public Library Emily Dickinson THE EMILY DICKINSON COLLECTION The Houghton Library, Harvard University F. Scott Fitzgerald F. SCOTT FITZGERALD PAPERS 1897-1944 Firestone Library, Princeton University James Joyce THE JAMES JOYCE COLLECTION The Poetry Collection, The State University of New York at Buffalo Jack Kerouac JACK KEROUAC PAPERS, 1920-1977 The Berg Collection, The New York Public Library Toni…

You’ve been working on a manuscript for the next bestselling novel, and you’re finally ready to send it out. All the time you’ve spent with reading groups, writing groups and focus groups won’t matter much if you simply pop your masterpiece into the mail without thoroughly researching the publisher you’ve decided will drop everything to put your work out into the world. Before you submit to a publisher, whether big or small, go through this checklist to make sure you’ve perfectly met criteria to ensure an editor’s eye peruses your project. Read all the publisher’s submission guidelines. • Make sure your work aligns with the themes sought by the publisher. • Submit via the requested portal (email, submission manager, snail mail, etc.). • Format your submission in the specified manner.…

NAME Jon Savitt YEARS WRITING 3 GENRE Comedy TWITTER @savittj OUTLETS The Huffi ngton Post, Buzzfeed, MTV.com You have 6,000+ Twitter followers. How do you grow a following like that? It all comes down to creating valuable, relatable content. It didn’t happen overnight, and at first, the goal wasn’t to build a following. I just wanted to use social media as a creative outlet. I try really hard to interact with everyone I can. If someone asks a question, gives me a compliment or even makes a negative comment, I always try to write back. It’s called “social” media for a reason, and I try to remember that. How do you get big names – @Nordstrom, @AmericanAir, @Cinnabon – to tweet you back? One of my favorite aspects of social…

Miasha Coleman’s book Swing lives in the realm of the novella, a work that toggles between short story and novel formats. You might say Miasha – in print, she goes by first name only – toggles between a couple of worlds as well. She grew up in tough circumstances and now is a best-selling author. She writes about mature subjects and is the mother of two boys. She has a strong moral code, and her characters push the limits of social acceptability. These are dichotomies, but not contradictions. When Miasha walks into the room, it’s impossible not to notice her. She carries herself with celebrity and conviction, as if she should have an entourage. Her style is urban chic right down to her bejeweled fingernails. We met at the Miami…

2nd place “Nights Like These” by Bhargavi Lanka “My short story is about facing difficulties and making a better situation for yourself with what you have. When I started writing the story, I wanted to capture the innocence of a child, who didn’t understand what was going on around her. However, as I continued, I started to build on the idea of growth. The child, age 6 in the beginning, would morph into a 17-year-old girl who would eventually be able to provide for her poor family that immensely struggled for her.” 3rd place “Ellyn Miranda” by Jill Meyer “Though we have come to understand certain aspects of the ocean, much of it remains a vast mystery, and because of this the ocean has become a character with human traits…

Sue Monk Kidd is the author of three novels. Her debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees, published in 2002, garnered attention from both critics and the reading public. Made into a movie in 2008, the novel is set in South Carolina in 1964, at the height of racial tensions over the new Civil Rights legislation. Her most recent novel, The Invention of Wings, an Oprah Book Club 2.0 selection, is set in 19th-century South Carolina and focuses on the life of sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who rejected their wealthy family’s ownership of slaves and devoted themselves to the burgeoning abolitionist cause. “They were, arguably, the most radical females to ever come out of the antebellum South. I fell in love with their story,” Kidd has said. She is…