Last night the poetry reading at Gallery 325 was a blast. (Maybe not a blast by Independence Day standards but, certainly by any standard one might apply to a poetry reading.) Many original works were read. The fact that the poems had been rewritten, mulled over, and sweated out was proven by the authors’ confidence and comfort levels. By and large, this wasn’t a ‘this is my latest rough draft’ type reading. It was enjoyable at many levels. It’s wonderful to ...Read More Here...Read Full Post
Tonight (Friday) the Copper Country Community Poetry Reading will be held at Gallery 325 in Baraga. The reading is from 6-7pm and then there will be an art show opening from 7-9. The Copper Country Poets feature 10 or so readings per year at various locations throughout the Copper Country. They are free to the public. New poets are welcome and ...Read More Here...Read Full Post
Real readers won't notice? Shortly after a bunch of aspiring writers start wrangling over the rules (which aren't rules, but tools, of course) someone will say, "But real readers won't notice, so why should I worry?" This is particularly true if some professional feedback has indicated that something technical is awry: point-of-view, say, or showing-and-telling. One way of fending off such feedback is to say that it's missing the point: who cares, if it's a good read? And it's backed up by the first handful of books you grab off your shelf. If it was good enough for Woolf/Rowling/Dickens/wotsername-who-wrote-50-shades-of-grey then it's good enough for us.
To a degree it's true, of course. As Mark Lawson said a propos Michael Crichton, of the three aspects of fiction - narrative, ideas and prose - a weakness in one can be made up for by the other two's brilliance. Read Full Post
Society's Pound of Flesh: Mary Shelley by Helen Edmundson at the Tricycle, Kilburn It wasn't a brightly-lit play; most of the indoor scenes were gloomy rooms above a bookshop where Mary's family jostled for space. The rest weren't much different: a graveside; a stormy sea-crossing; a garret in Switzerland.
Anyway, there I was, thankful that I'd learned the technique of writing in the dark years ago on a BFI film course -you use a flip notebook and your left thumb as a guide to write your way down the page. All very well until the interval, when I discovered my pen had run out of ink about two pages into the play!
Read Full Post
This morning I am putting the finishing touches on five short fiction pieces that have been on the shelf for several weeks. (Rewrites were back in April.) When we get back from Chicago I will whisk them off with a click to various slush piles across the etherpit. Read more here...Read Full Post
Is There a Doc in the House? We went out to Twin Lakes on Saturday morning. We put the dock in, mowed the grass, cleaned up a pickup truck load of junk, and caught 50 bluegills. All this happened in 90+ degree temps with black flies. While it may sound rather dreadful, we enjoyed it and stayed until noon today. (Monday) I found time to play fiddle and concertina after dark both nights and even wrote a couple of poems. I guess most people... Read More Here...Read Full Post
THE CRYING OF THE CHILDREN: SAMPLE CHAPTERS
How would you describe it? Aspiring writers often seem to agonise about the thing they call Description, as if it was a whole, separate kind of writing from the rest of the narrative. They know they should have some, but they can't seem to get it right: it's "floppy" as one such writer put it, or "slows things down" as one of my students said. And most of all, there's the looming fear of cliché, of off-the-peg words or settings, which every aspiring writer knows they should be trying to avoid, without actually knowing how to do so.
I think the problem has two faces. First, you need to exercise your decribing-muscles, and since fiction takes the bits and pieces of the world and spins them into a new form, you need to exercise both skills. Then you need to be clear about what you're trying to do in this project, because it's that clarity which will mean the right words come.
Taking bits and pieces is the first step in learning to avoid cliché, too, because it's about getting back to the actual experience of things: you and the thing and no one else's words - second-hand words - trying to express it. Read Full Post
Two of my poems can be found here at Crack the Spine in Issue #27. (Pages 30-33) One of them, Final Appearance, was born from a WW Flash Poetry group challenge. The other is a racy bit I wrote on the train a couple of years ago and... Read More HereRead Full Post
I received good news from Editor Kerri Farrell Foley at Crack the Spine last week. Two of my poems, User Manual and Final Appearance, have been accepted and will appear in Issue #27. Crack the Spine publishes both online and perfect-bound print anthologies which feature... Read More HereRead Full Post
Previous Blog Posts
1 | ... | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | ... | 171 |
|
Top WW Bloggers
|
Dave Morehouse
EmmaD
AmberKingston
Follow us on Twitter |
Articles |
Site Tour |
Help |
Terms |
Privacy |
About | Contact |