Writing

child drawings of monsters
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Alt-weeklies, Prose Poems, Heroes: An Interview With Brandon Soderberg

ByPatrice Hutton

2017 came, and I was in the market for words to live by. I needed a mantra to get me through the month of January. Miraculously, I found them four days into the new year: “We’re all special once we get to know each other.”

I found these words in “heroes” by Brandon Soderberg, Baltimore City Paper’s Deputy Editor and Arts Editor. The words came after a description of a Baltimore seven-year-old who was shot and killed last year.

The Storytellers: Arab-American Writers Have Something to Say

The Storytellers: Arab-American Writers Have Something to Say

ByDawne Shand

Randa Jarrar, the president of the Radius of Arab American Writers—whose acronym RAWI, means “storyteller” in Arabic—was a teenager in 1996 when the organization first came into being. Now a published novelist, fiction editor of The Normal School, and professor at Fresno State, Jarrar attended early RAWI conferences and met other Arab-American writers whom she had admired from a distance. She is one of her creative community’s many success stories.

beam design-printed paper on desk

Machine Language

ByIan Denning

I recently spent a long weekend collaborating with friends on a narrative outline for a point-and-click adventure video game. Relying less on twitchy button-mashing and more on logic puzzles, conversation, and critical thinking, the adventure game genre is a good project for a writer.

selective focus photography of books on bookcases near people sits in chairs

The Learning Curve: Fact, Fiction, and What I’ve Learned

ByYardenne Greenspan

This ability to slip in and out and between voices has been crucial for my style of work. I’ve always been involved in multiple projects at a time, and while I typically finish translating one book before moving on to the next, there are always edits coming back from authors, or small rush jobs to fit in, and as in life, nothing is neat and clean and separate.

men's brown weimaraner dog on gray asphalt road
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Dogs in the Literary Imagination

ByJennifer R. Bernstein

From Odysseus’s faithful Argos to White Fang to Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Shiloh, dogs have occupied the centers and peripheries of human stories since we began telling them. It’s no wonder; dogs were first domesticated by hunter-gatherers (not, as many believe, by agriculturalists) over 15,000 years ago, the first species to live among and alongside people.