How long has it been since I last did one of these?! I’m sorry, my friends. Feast your eyes on this handful of goodies…
In the US and the UK alike, the dominant culture means middle/upper class white people, like myself, and if I know poetry culture round these parts, very likely yourself too. And it doesn’t take much research [...] to see that poetry in these islands have a serious problem acknowledging and supporting work by black and minority ethnic poets. The message runs: white people have won prizes and are taught on the curriculum, thus are culturally central, thus constitute the category ‘good poetry’, thus white people make the prize lists [ed – the Forward Prize has done sterling work in this regard as of late]. White people are the default and will be met with little/no critical objection; BAME poets are other, their presence requires justification. If they write in a way that does not fit within the existing poetic norm, they are very easily ignored, filed away in pre-made and ill-fitting categories that diminish their intellectual work; note how much easier it is for academic white poets to pick apart these aesthetic prejudices. I truly don’t imagine, however, that these decisions are made deliberately (that would be relatively easy to deal with); they seem to uncritically follow the kind of social imperatives that (at one extreme) make us call human beings seeking refuge from international warfare ‘swarms of immigrants’. It takes a huge and conscious effort to identify and expunge ourselves of the reflex prejudices our culture wants to imprint on us; note, for example, the way the term ‘identity politics’ has been appropriated as a means of dismissing the very discussion of those complex and fraught relations.
Then, if you need cheering up, you can read Every Scottish Novel Ever (it’s good).
There’s a new literary journal in town: it’s helmed by women, its first issue is out now, and it’s open for submissions as of October. Introducting Banshee, everyone!
Having looted and hoarded some food and filled their bathtubs with water, people would hunker down in their houses, creeping out into the backyards if they dared because their toilets would no longer flush. The lights would go out. Communication systems would break down. What next? Open a can of dog food, eat it, then eat the dog, then wait for the authorities to restore order. But the authorities — lacking transport — would be unable to do this.
Other authorities would take over. These would at first be known as thugs and street gangs, then as warlords. They’d attack the barricaded houses, raping, pillaging and murdering. But soon even they would run out of stolen food. It wouldn’t take long — given starvation, festering garbage, multiplying rats, and putrefying corpses — for pandemic disease to break out. It will quickly become apparent that the present world population of six and a half billion people is not only dependent on oil, but was created by it: humanity has expanded to fill the space made possible to it by oil, and without that oil it would shrink with astounding rapidity.
Margaret Atwood’s vision of an oil-less world is bleak, but yaknow, not necessarily fiction. Go read the whole thing, it’s frightening and brilliant.
Here’s a list of poetry contests with deadlines coming up soon. You’re welcome.
Competition for even the most menial jobs is fierce. I’ve applied up and down the coast, Victoria to Nanaimo. Colleges, pharmacies, hardware stores, hospitals, clinics, tourist information centres, campgrounds, airports, BC Ferries, administrative positions, landscaping companies, a paper-shredding business, liquor stores, a bookstore, consignment clothing shops, homestays, magazines, ad agencies, radio stations, newspapers, and technical writing positions are a few that come to mind.
I quality for Welfare Wednesdays at the special store where on the last Wednesday of each month, food’s sold at extra low prices. I qualify for Income Assistance (aka Welfare) but have been too determined to support myself to apply. After all, I do have a career. It just doesn’t pay.
Here’s the always-excellent Roxane Gay giving advice for female creatives.
An extract from the aforementioned Citizen, by Claudia Rankine. Amazing.
You’ll probably have heard about Amandla Stenberg being awesome all over the internet, but if you haven’t yet watched her video about hair politics, you really should.
I was lucky enough to work with Maryhill Integration Network and media co-op on the Making It Home project: now they’ve teamed up again to make this great short film with a group of refugee men who’ve settled in Scotland.
Would you like to be frightened out of your wits by the amount of stuff we STILL WASTE even after recycling? Watch The Story Of Stuff. No really. Watch it.
Rethink the way you talk to artists! Like, now!
And finally, Serena Williams’ take on Beyonce’s 7/11 is just. superb.
Have a great weekend!
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
How many stories and ideas aren’t being told - or aren’t being shared with the depth, clarity, or complexity they could be - because their creators don’t have the time or funds to make them? Who gets to have that “room of their own” where they can peace out and write at the end of the day? Who gets to not worry about paying the rent for three or twelve or thirty-six months… or in the most extreme cases, forever?
If no one hates you, no one is paying attention. If attention is what you want for vanity, confidence, or, hell — to make a decent living — then know that it’s not instantaneous. Every single person that you’re currently paying attention to, at some point in their lives, was in your exact position. They kept at it and worked enough so that others started listening.
Also know that if no one is watching, you can experience true freedom. Dance in your underwear. Write entirely for yourself.
I’m black, gay, and 29 years old. I had just published my first book of poetry. In retrospect, standing there with champagne in hand, I wish I’d felt proud rather than grateful — intensely, almost exhaustingly grateful to just be there. It’s the kind of gratitude that, I suspect, is very familiar to those whom our culture has a habit of reminding they should be happy “to just be here.”
Want to read a lovely short story? Shirley Muir’s ‘Out of the Blackness,’ submitted to Scottish Book Trust’s Journeys project, is pretty great!
Piracy as subterfuge, as an especially legitimate way to create art for the Caribbean —I could just about stretch my mind to accommodate that, but Mack’s plagiarism is not so thoughtful or intellectualized; it requires no such stretching of the mind. In her own words, it is just ‘carelessness’. Mack uses her poetic skills for euphemism. She apologizes for the work she has ‘unintentionally appropriated’. The whole apology… I’m afraid is worth a hearty guffaw. As one Facebook poster said in a conversation happening amongst West African poets, ‘Isn’t this what we know as mere stealing in Nigeria?’
The best response I have read to the recent Sheree Mack story is this one by the great Kei Miller.
Here’s a happy customer of Edinburgh Vintage who bought some books from me… and then wrote about it! Thanks, Beth!
Warsan Shire, just… gobsmacking.
Deleted Scenes of Women in Disaster Movies Written by Men. Watch it, it’s horribly true (and funny).
I so want to see this… and plan to have all the feels about it.
Have a great weekend!
Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
I question it all. If no one is going to read it, why did I put so much energy into that book? Why did I agonize over the phrasing that takes place on page nine or the metaphor on page ninety-nine? Why did I choose that topic or story and why did I think it would resonate? I even begin to question my passion. What am I doing this for? Why do I spend so much time contributing my thoughts and words for so little monetary return? Am I any good at this?
What Happens When (Virtually) No One Buys Your Book?
Parallel Universes run parallel to each other with slight alterations that change fate in time. Whoa. Multiverse is when there are many parallel universes. Usually this has something to do with black holes and time travel. More than likely, Spock is traveling through all of them. When you toss metafiction in here, it’s a little odd to compare it, but kind of important. Metafiction is when a story becomes aware of itself. It’s kind of like parallel universes colliding. Authors often join in on their own stories- literally.
Eric Ries, a lecturer on entrepreneurship and innovation, went on a “pre-book” book tour to drum up interest before his work, “The Lean Startup”, even had a firm name, and started selling it online more than a year in advance of its publication. It worked. The book’s cover is now able to boast “the New York Times bestseller” above the title.
Want to be an author? You also need to be an entrepreneur.
I am currently reading Kathleen Jones‘ The Whistling Poet, a brilliant biography of Norman Nicholson, who I love. Here’s a great recording of him reading one of his poems, ‘Wall,’ at the Poetry Archive.
From 2nd to 15th March, the imprint will be open to accept fifty pages, an outline and an author biography from previously unpublished writers of fiction. Short stories will be considered, in addition to novels.
Tinder Press wants your submissions! (Thanks, Heather!)
Here’s a VERY useful and interesting list of open submission calls. You’re welcome.
Also… do you write erasure poems, or want to? Are you not a cishet white dude? This is a submissions call just for you and it looks GREAT.
Have a great weekend!
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
The spine must not be bent back and broken, the pages must not be marked with dog ears, there must be no underlining, no writing in the margins. Obviously, for those of us brought up on library books and school-owned textbooks (my copy of Browning bore the name of a dozen pupils who had used the text before me), there were simple and sensible reasons supporting this behavior. But the reverence went beyond a proper respect for those who would be reading the pages after you. Even when I bought a book myself, if my parents caught me breaking its spine so that it would lay open on the desk, they were shocked. Writing was sacred. In the beginning was the Word.
As an avid spine-breaker, page-folder, underliner and marginalia-writer, I approve this message.
I know I was influenced by my father. He wrote dreadful poetry (The Death of a Crab under a Piece of Damp Seaweed) but he was fantastically good at limericks and chirpy doggerel, and was always making up rhymes about anything and everything. When we put our coats on he would push our arms into the sleeves chanting “Moley moley, down the holey”, and tooth brushing was accompanied by songs. “Yellowy teeth make Grandma frown, so swish your toothbrush up and down.” In a different time my father might have been an actor.
So hey, you know David Harsent probably won the TS Eliot Prize ’cause his bff was on the judging panel? Turns out his book is also incredibly misogynistic! Yay poetry!
When T.S. Eliot begins “The Wasteland” with a quotation from Petronius in the original Latin and Greek, he is in effect saying, “You must be this educated to read my poem.” Eliot relies on a complex mechanism of traditional imagery and symbolic structures to score his aesthetic points. [...] Collins’ plain-spokenness, on the other hand, welcomes greater numbers as they are, including readers who (by virtue of class, sex, race, or any number of factors) might not have had the opportunity to learn a half-dozen European languages.
Billy Collins: officially awesome.
If you want to feel like the laziest person in the WHOLE WORLD, listen to Kaite Welsh talking about her freelancing career on The Mountain Shores. (No really, it’s very interesting and entertaining!)
Inequality in literary magazines and inequality in pay are both important, and in connected ways. The visibility and status of women’s writing is important precisely because of a web of marginalization across all areas of life. If women’s voices are always peripheral to male voices intoning from the center of culture, then their voices are peripheral on all issues: the pay gap, consent, harassment, rape, domestic violence, reproductive freedom, the glass ceiling, childcare. The obscuring of women’s voices in media platforms, however elite, however niche, is part of the obscuring of their voices in general; and a lack of commitment to, or an inability to hear, their voices in literary culture is related to the same lacks and inabilities in relation to their voices in harassment, in sex, in courtrooms, and in the workplace.
“And, hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy,
and then he added,
“it’s actually about ethics in games journalism.”
I know I am too late for Valentine’s Day, but Romantic Poems for Misandrists is basically the best thing on the internet right now.
Christian is not an interesting man. He doesn’t enjoy anything. I have no problem gallivanting about with someone who has issues and demons so long as they have some flavor, but Christian Grey is just bland and damaged. Throughout the movie Christian makes it clear he likes to be in control but he makes this known the same way he might tell you he enjoys pea soup. Ugh.
Here’s the amazing Roxane Gay being right-on (and hilarious) about 50 Shades at The Toast.
If you are an x-Files fan like myself, YOU MUST SEE THIS TUMBLR.
I love this short film of fat women talking about their everyday lives, and busting some myths. (Featuring the amazing Bethany Rutter! Also, fabulous person with the glasses? I would like to know where you acquired your excellent shirt.)
Need a laugh? This is pretty great…
(even if it is on RHGN, and Russell Howard is a rape-joke-making fool.)
Ten years ago I was obsessed with Red House Painters, and then I kinda forgot they existed. I just rediscovered them and it was a great joy that made me feel 18 again.
Have a great weekend!
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
I knew when I really got going on the book that there were places in the writing that reflected my potential. That’s as much as you can ask for as a writer, at least initially. It was a long, long journey. But by the time I had completed a draft of the book, I knew I had something. And yet on the day my agent submitted it to editors I had a mild breakdown and thought, What if nobody wants this? And I spent all these years?
If you read nothing else in this post, read How To Write Your First Book. Newsflash: the biggest, best and brightest writers feel or have felt the exact same anxieties you do. It is wonderful.
I just came across this Poet’s Calendar, showing which major journals are open for submissions when. Very handy!
Tights are the work of the devil (leggings rule OK). However, I am tempted by these poetic ones.
While we’re still fascinated by the young world-changers who can barely grow stubble and the 60-year-olds who realize their ‘true passion’ is to raise alpacas/grow wine/renovate houses in France, the concept of a single dream is beginning to look both difficult and oddly obsolete.
Her hobbies included smoking, wearing trousers, martial arts, motor cars, and swearing. She passed her retirement in Cornwall gambling, drinking, and painting – all the while, of course, giving no fucks.
A dude on OKCupid (yeah, any sentence that starts with those words spells trouble) attacked a woman for supposedly lying about how fast she could type. So she kicked his ignorant ass.
Losing weight doesn’t make you a more interesting, attractive person. It just makes you thinner. And I don’t buy into thinness as the ultimate goal. Stop indulging weight-loss talk. Assert the fact that you have not bought into the fatphobic and ableist belief that weight loss is the social and ethical holy grail. Tell weight loss to fuck off.
THIS IS WHERE I WORK, Y’ALL. We do some amazing stuff, if I do say so myself.
This video is absolutely gorgeous, and full of wonderous advice.
The media depiction of women (and men) in 2014 was a bit grim at times. Let’s do better.
& finally, in case you need cheering up after that… just a really pretty song.
Have a great weekend!
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
Oddly, in British culture, some people DO actually believe that words are more important and more worthy than pictures. They believe a ‘proper book’ is one that lets them create all the images in their head, with no picture crutches. They might assume pictures are for children, a means of luring them into the REAL business of reading words.
The idea of a post full of dating tips from Mr Darcy is a good one, but WTF BUZZFEED the Keira Knightley P&P is a pile of crap. This should have been entirely BBC version! Harrumph.
I did a cursory search of Jane Austen sequels to see how many had been penned. One website counted over 70 sequels, while another went up to 180. If you add in out-of-print titles and fan-fiction written online, the number explodes. Titles include Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma, A Wife for Mr. Darcy (not to be confused with Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, Pemberley, the Fitzwilliam Darcy: Gentleman series, and sequels to all five other Austen novels, as well as many mash-ups, pastiches, and re-imaginings with or without zombies and vampires). There are several authors who have made their entire careers just writing sequels for one Austen novel after another.
The best stories don’t hit a single note; they chime resonant chords. Don’t settle for a narrative that illustrates violence. Revisit it until that violence is laced with regret, love, or fear. Work until your capacity for complexity surprises you.
Fancy some writing advice you won’t have heard before? I loved this article from Amy Jo Burns.
“Pizza…” Is that an invitation? An opinion? It sits there waiting for a response. This brings awkwardness into the equation, and the ellipsis (or even the written words “dot dot dot”) is another way to say “well this is awkward.” The conversation is not over, but someone has to make a move.
These mobile libraries are freakin’ amazing! There’s even a DONKEY LIBRARY!
Don’t listen to all those authors who say ‘I meditate, then write for eight hours a day at my immaculate desk, and then go for a jog’. Listening to them made me feel like I was doing it wrong because I spend 80% of the time having nervous breakdowns, 15% eating crisps, and about 5% writing, often in bed. I’ve come to believe that most other writers actually have a similar routine.
I really, really, really liked Amy Mason’s author confessions.
I loved these weird and wonderful converted buildings.
ONS fave dorkymum is involved in a whimsical new blog project, Folklings. It’s lovely!
My sister showed me this epic dancing video and now I utterly love the totally uninhibited dude in it.
& finally, I am basically obsessed with this song at the moment.
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
What if instead of asking what characters are running toward, we ask what they’re running from? What deep fears motivate our characters? Perhaps this focus on fear and character is even more helpful when looking at the power of the quiet novel, which is more likely to focus on intense, everyday anxieties. A character may not be able to describe what love they wish to move toward, but they are aware of a deep-seeded unease that pushes them away from the status quo.
Go on, inject a little fear into your writing…
I love that this list of ghost stories for babies and toddlers is entitled Hallo-wean. Nice one, Scottish Book Trust.
SBT also have great suggestions for scary books that are safe for 8-11s, and books that are much more frightening than their film counterparts!
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
You basically have to read Anne Sexton on Halloween, those are the rules. & The Poetry Foundation have put together this list of other Halloween poems, too!
Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart… as told via random gifs.
9 DIY feminist Halloween costumes, in case you’re still looking for inspiration! (I love The Notorious RBG!)
They’re easy to please, just feed them some brains,
…and if you want more Halloween-y poems for kids, I recommend tracking down that Josh Seigal fella. He’s got loads, including this one!
These literary jack-o-lanterns are so good, they look Photoshopped. But they aren’t. I know.
There’s more to scary stories than goblins, ghouls, blood and your general horror — here there be monsters of many kinds, existential and literal, extraordinary and everyday. And remember: like beauty, fear is in the bloody eye of the beholder.
Flavorwire have helpfully picked fifty scary short stories that you can read to scare yourself silly this evening.
What the society’s mission means is that its members are “a community of like-minded people who . . . enjoy the history, culture, & poetry associated with the lives and deaths of poets, their gravesites, and their poetry related to death,” and who are committed to “documenting and resurrecting the dead poets of America” by visiting and archiving as many poets’ graves across the country as they can.
This is super cute. Thanks to Alice T for sharing!
That’s my [Halloween] jam! Every year.
…well, that and THIS.
Have a great weekend!
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
For the average book, you figure $7 will go to overhead, and that leaves the last $1.50 as profit. For the average book, the expected contribution to overhead could be $50,000 to $150,000. That’s why most editors have a minimum number of copies they have to aim for with any book. (At some imprints, that’s 10,000 copies. At others, it’s 25,000 or even 50,000.) Random House can’t sign up a thousand $3,500-advance novels because each of those books has to carry the weight of all that overhead.
An excellent answer to the question, “why did Random House pay $3.5m for Lena Dunham’s stupid memoir instead of paying 1,000 novelists £3,500 each?”
Chris Abani once said in a workshop that readers will always wonder if your characters are you–even if your main character is a Chihuahua. There’s not much to do about this wondering except write the characters you want to write with complexity and empathy.
Your characters are all you. Here’s how to make it less obvious.
Part of the reason it took Fitzgerald so long to finish Tender is the Night was Zelda’s worsening condition. But you’d think that his haphazard, alcohol-fueled creative process wasn’t doing him any favors, either.
Yet recent research has shown that messy, dark, noisy, booze-filled environments like the one Fitzgerald cultivated at La Paix can, in fact, help stimulate creativity.
You should probably spend a lot of your twenties doing art from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep, and turning down a lot of unnecessary commitments in service of that. First, because that’s what you need to do to be good enough so that when you have inspiration, your inspiration will lead to something; and second, because it’s almost fucking impossible to make a living drawing pictures, writing words, or playing music. Just the fact that we think we can do these things for a living is an intense act of hope and arrogance. If you want to be able to do that, if you decide to stake your claim on that path, then oh, my God you have to do such hard work! If you’re the sort of person who fucking whines about being motivated, like some of the art students I lecture, then just fucking stop. I’m not interested in speaking to anyone who wonders how to motivate themselves. If you need to talk about how to get motivated, then go get a normal job in the normal scheme of the world and just do art as a hobby so you still love it. Stop clogging up the field for the people who need this like a drug.
My reading speed is 236 words per minute! Find out yours.
I don’t think writing the truth makes you strong by default. I think it makes you vulnerable, which in turn can make you strong. It’s a naked feeling, both writing about yourself and writing about those you once loved, still love, and some you never loved at all. And though we may highly value the opinions of our loved ones, that doesn’t always mean we must ask their permission to write our stories in full.
If, like me, you steal details from real people’s lives for your writing, you should read this.
Today, in politically correct 21st-century Britain, you might think things would have changed but somehow the Great White Male has thrived and continues to colonise the high-status, high-earning, high-power roles (93 per cent of executive directors in the UK are white men; 77 per cent of parliament is male). The Great White Male’s combination of good education, manners, charm, confidence and sexual attractiveness (or “money”, as I like to call it) means he has a strong grip on the keys to power.
Why we need poetry. (More literary TED talks here!)
HOLY SHIT Danny MacAskill!!!
Have a great weekend!
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
These dismally low numbers provide a reminder that “access” to education is more complicated than simply throwing open the digital doors to whoever wants to sign up. So how can we turn the mere availability of online instruction in STEM into true access for female students?
Are girls under-respresented in STEM classes because they learn differently?
Poetry books to buy in September. (I have poems in both Be The First To Like This and Songs of Other Places, so definitely get those!)
She will tell you about how, when she was small, she could lose herself in a novel for hours, and now, all she can do is watch the tweets swim by like glittery fish in the river of time-she-will-never-get-back. You will begin to chafe at what sounds like a humblebrag—I was precocious and remain an intellectual at heart or I feel oppressed by my active participation in the cultural conversation—but then you will realize, with an ache of recognition, that you are in the same predicament.
Reading insecurity: it is a thing. (I loved this article!)
Bad Book Cover Redesigns, as skewered by Flavorwire (I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable about those ‘Murakami is Japanese!’ covers).
The more reading moved online, the less students seemed to understand. There were the architects who wrote to her about students who relied so heavily on ready digital information that they were unprepared to address basic problems onsite. There were the neurosurgeons who worried about the “cut-and-paste chart mentality” that their students exhibited, missing crucial details because they failed to delve deeply enough into any one case. And there were, of course, the English teachers who lamented that no one wanted to read Henry James anymore.
If the hero is police, then he’ll be the departmental maverick, too honest and decent to engage in office politics yet laser-focused on nailing his perp. Often there’s a murdered relative, almost always female, to juice this crusader’s motivation. His marriage will have fallen apart because he’s too stoic and too devoted to the Job to sustain a real relationship. But he’ll be devoted to his kid and a one-woman romantic at heart, even if hardly anybody ever gets near that heart. He’ll brood a lot and go home alone. He’ll have a temper, but a righteous one. He might drink too much or be too ready with his fists, but that just makes him a bit of antihero…
Rebus, much?! If you’re sick of cookie-cutter crime fiction, the answer is simple: read women.
Several times a year I am the recipient of emails or phone calls from friends, colleagues, parents, or complete strangers in search of writing guidance. Often the messages begins, “Hello, my name is Barbra. My daughter wants to be a writer. She’s very talented. Jill Matthews said you might be able to . . .” What follows ranges from, “give some advice” to “edit her trilogy.” These types of messages leave me sighing, not because I don’t enjoy cultivating new voices, but because how those people perceive the writing community and the writing vocation is often vastly different from actuality.
Do you get these emails? (I do!) Here’s a toolkit of things to send back in reply.
I LOVED this article about ‘life after the MFA.’ (Applies to other creative writing qualifications, too!) In it, one writer shares her “dream” back-of-the-book biography, then her real one…
One of the biggest mistakes I see in queries is what I call data-dump. This is when a query is too wordy or too long and is trying too hard to describe the world and/or fantasy elements.
Sending out your novel? Writer’s Digest have a great series showing successful query letters from real authors. Here’s one recent example!
This, also from Writer’s Digest, on applying for grants and residencies, is great.
The power of reading someone else’s words… and seeing yourself.
I’ve always been confused by this new found fetishisation of Scotch eggs and pork pies, with so many flash new pubs selling them at the bar.
I mean, I like Scotch eggs as much as the next Englishman, but I can’t help but think this kind of ancient casual bar snack cuisine they’re nodding to never really existed. Pork scratchings, yes, but Scotch eggs? You buy those from Saino’s, not from pubs. To me, pub cuisine will forever be associated with steak flavoured McCoy’s and the occasional reheated beef pie.
I’ve always loved ELO (sorry not sorry) but only discovered this song with the movie and now can’t. stop. listening.
I’ve posted this before but the video is so beautiful and very autumnal.
& I just discovered The Chin Review and haven’t laughed so much in a long time. So silly.
Have a great weekend!
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
Is it, you may be wondering, good? No. But neither is it entirely bad. “Directing Herbert White” is the sort of collection written by reasonably talented M.F.A. students in hundreds of M.F.A. programs stretching from sea to shining sea. Which is perhaps not surprising, since Franco actually has an M.F.A. in poetry. I’m obliged here to note that this actor is well acquainted with the educational system, having apparently attended graduate programs at Yale, Columbia, New York University, Brooklyn College, Warren Wilson College, the Rhode Island School of Design, Le Cordon Bleu, Quantico, Hogwarts (Ravenclaw), the Vaganova School of Russian Ballet and the Jedi Academy.
This review of James Franco’s “jesus age” poetry collection is actually mildly complimentary!
Her website (since removed) claimed incorrectly that she had been a Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet, when in fact she had been in a program to be mentored by a Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet.
Here are some kids moaning about great books on Twitter (Or I should say great books, except The Mayor of Casterbridge. I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU, CHILD.)
This article, though mostly common sense, had some smart ideas for marketing your novel — especially if you self-publish.
(Related: How to screw up a book proposal.)
Technology has upended the business of publishing at precisely the same time as writers with a broader range of stories to tell about human experience are finally gaining a platform. In the past year I have scarfed down novels by and about survivors of the mental health system, as well as immigrants, queers and angry young women whose experience informs their prose but does not define it. On those nights when I wake up worrying that some day I’ll have read all the interesting novels, I am comforted by the sure knowledge that there are more than seven billion stories to tell, and they’re being told better than ever.
And while we’re being whimsical, here’s a cute literary Etsy treasury!
The internet is your friend, but not your best mate.
Never a truer word, sir! Matt Whyman on creating setting and place in your writing.
50 novels by women under 50… also known as My New To-Read List.
The Hand Drawn Map Association is a stunning collection of creative and alternative maps of everything from London to the human heart.
“As a writer who is also a woman, I increasingly feel that writing is a political act whether I intend it to be or not,” she writes, because we live in a culture in which [rape apologism] “is permissible and publishable. I am troubled by how we have allowed such intellectual distance between violence and the representation of violence. We talk about rape, but we don’t carefully talk about rape.”
I really, really, really want to go out for a beer with Roxane Gay.
I’m a sucker for these “Top 10 Most whatever whatevers!” posts, I know… but this Powerful Social Issue Ads one is really rather interesting.
I remember and cherish that scene: him running, naked thighs flashing, penis bobbing, her gasping and chasing after him in her old-fashioned white nightgown, the dogs barking outside.
Bleeding glaciers, blue lava, rainbow mountains, UFO clouds: these are Real Things In The World.
How tattooed people were saved from their terrible past choices.
Have I posted this stand-up before? Rape jokes: you are doing it RIGHT.
And I have needed this SO MANY TIMES lately.
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
