Uncategorized Archive
Writing Lessons: Sarah Sherman
In our Writing Lessons series, writers and writing students will discuss lessons learned, epiphanies about craft, and the challenges of studying writing. This week, we hear from Sarah Sherman, an MFA candidate at The College of Saint Rose. —Andrew Ladd, Blog Editor Before speaking to us, he sat comfortably in
The Ploughshares Round-Down: Three Things Writers Can Learn From Solange and Jay Z
Between Jill Abramson’s indecorous firing and Amazon’s ongoing vendetta against Hachette, the publishing world gave me a lot of potential topics for the Ploughshares Round-Down this week, which I’m covering for Tasha Golden while she takes some well-earned time off. And yet there’s another, completely non-publishing-related story that I
Dancing About Architecture
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” said Elvis Costello once, probably quoting someone else. And yet, and yet… It is apparently a strong urge to write about (or somehow with) music. The list of creative writing that involves music in some way is long, and grows longer
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Prayer for the moth, but also for the spider” by Caitlin Horrocks
I can’t tell you the last time I prayed. At least, not in the way that the narrator does in Caitlin Horrocks‘ recent story, “Prayer for the moth, but also for the spider,” in issue 21 of Memorious. I spent twelve years in Catholic school, so I can recite a mean
Believe in the Gimmicks: On The Squared Circle and the World of Professional Wrestling
Under Review: The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker (2013, Gotham Books, 400 pages) I was caught quite off guard last month when my Twitter feed—usually the domain of snarky chatter about baseball, basketball, and football—was suddenly overtaken by a flood of breathless comments about
The Ploughshares Round-Down: How Publishing Looks From the Agent’s Side
If I were forced to write a mission statement, it would be short and sweet: “Help authors. Have fun.” It’s easy for anyone in this business to lose sight of the fact that we do what we do because we love books, and that everyone else we meet is here
Episodia 2.5: The Third Heat
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,
Book Recommendations That Indulge Your Addiction to That Feeling of Creeping Horror
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.
Lungs Full of Noise
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
Because I Could Not Stop for the Death of the Novel…
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.