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Last week I received an email from a dear student with a serious case of writer’s block. She’s been writing a screenplay for the last four years, and her work is almost finished. To her despair, however, she recently discovered that her very project (idea, locale, plot, and timeframe, all) was made into a film…
I was going through a major book slump this past month, and it was driving me crazy. I scanned my way through a how-to that felt flimsy. I rushed through one memoir that felt a bit all over the place, and abandoned another one after reading a single chapter. I made it more than halfway…
Lungs Full of Noise Tessa Mellas University of Iowa Press, October 2013 128 pages $17.00 Buy: book | ebook In one of Tessa Mellas’s stories, a woman gives birth to a plant-baby. While everyone else is a little perplexed, the mother looks at the newborn—his green skin, leaves and buds—and thinks that “he is beautiful…
There was once a time when we’d all sit around reading essays on how novels are dead. We’d gather in the parlor of an evening—mother, father, daughter, son—the Victrola softly playing in the background, and each read, in our own various evening papers, about the death of the book. But in this modern era, with…
Over the last two weeks, the internets have exploded with news about terrible comment sections and how to handle trolls. As writers, we know that since comment sections are where humanity goes to die (Ploughshares comments excepted of course), putting creative work online basically means exposing ourselves to the worst mankind has to offer. (Hooray!) Enter mass advice geared toward writers and artists, telling…
It took every fiber of me not to rattle off a quick ditty about Gabo the night after he passed. I tried, of course, but then where do you stop? Fifteen thousand words? Twenty? In this digital age you’re late even if only by a day, which seemed appropriate actually, because I’m a Texican—A Texas…
1. Last year, I started writing a novel. Along the way, craving completion, I wrote and published seventeen pieces of flash prose. Instead of an epic, I accidentally created a flash chapbook. 2. Okay, maybe not accidentally. I took a break from the novel for a few months to focus exclusively on flash. Why…
Annie Cardi is the author of the new young adult book The Chance You Won’t Return (Candlewick Press), which has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and also won the PEN New England Susan P. Bloom Children’s Book Discovery Award in its manuscript form. Annie is a wonderful writer as well as an avid reader of both young adult books…
Anyone who has had a dance party alone in their room can attest to the helpfulness of an impromptu hoe-down. In her textbook Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway advises writers struggling with revision to “worry it and walk away,” but sometimes you need to dance away. The play involved might not immediately solve the craft problem…
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