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Of all the rules that artists follow, this one is paramount: never ever fill in details before the structure is done. Painters sometimes spend hours sketching before ever touching the canvas. And when they finally do, they build their work slowly, layering in color, laboring on the drawing underneath, roughing in the composition before tightening it…
Leonardo DiCaprio called during his Golden Globes acceptance speech for viewers to deepen our appreciation and respect for First Nations tribes, and made-for-cable movies are showing Natives in a more positive, less violent light. But what about us writers and readers? Who among us is giving a shout out to indigenous writers? As for all…
After years of dodging PTO meetings and volunteer opportunities, I became involved in a school overcrowding issue in my town because I didn’t want my children’s class sizes to become enormous. The problem seemed simple at first, but soon enough I was attending school committee meetings, spending hours writing emails, and holding forth at…
On its blog last week, the Huntington Library released previously unseen photographs of some of the late Octavia Butler’s papers, which the library catalogued after Butler’s untimely death nearly ten years ago. Included in the collection are some of Butler’s early science fiction stories, contracts, drafts, and notebooks, one of which caught the attention of…
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is a fiction and nonfiction writer from Singapore. Her stories appear in the anthologies From the Belly of the Cat (2009) and Let’s Tell This Story Properly: Commonwealth Short Story Prize Anthology (2015), as well as in the journal Mänoa. Her nonfiction work includes Singapore: A Biography (2009), co-authored with Mark Ravinder Frost and commissioned by the National…
In “Bethlehem” (One Throne Magazine), Chika Unigwe explores the ways in which a community’s sources of pride and ignorance can cause tragedy in the lives of those who don’t fit into the conventional molds. In the first section, Unigwe presents clues to the conflict between the protagonist Chimelumma and her infant Beth (short for Bethlehem)….
Poets often respond to other poets in their work. With fiction, these connections are less apparent and yet they are there, as writers want to pay homage to or have a conversation with another writer.
Testament G.C. Waldrep BOA Editions, 2015 144 pp, $16 Buy: paperback | Kindle | Nook An endnote to G. C. Waldrep’s excellent new book-length poem points out that it “originated as a exploration of and response to three texts,” Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (2009), Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise (2008), and Alice Notley’s Alma, or…
Not too long ago, as a writer who was based in India, once a colony of the British, and who had once been a “citizen of the world” living in the United States, I wondered, with apprehension, whether my stories would resonate with American and global readers and editors. As a struggling writer, I presumed…
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