This week’s Circus & Carnival poetry prompt celebrates a guilty pleasure: Carnival food. Where else can you write a poem about corn dogs?
Memoir Notebook: Elements of Style
Memoir Notebook is a monthly column dedicated to longer creative non-fiction works. Today, Wm. Anthony Connolly is cutting onions. Or is he?
National Poetry Month: poemcrazy: Hi There Stars
Sometimes poetry is just begging not to be understood. In this week’s ‘poemcrazy’ book club installment, we’re invited to ‘not think, not understand.’
Poets and Writers Toolkit: Six-Word Memoirs
Charity Singleton Craig hosts a segment of our Poets and Writers Toolkit featuring Six-Word Memoirs to spark creativity.
National Poetry Month: poemcrazy: Listening to Ourselves
We’re reading ‘poemcrazy: freeing your life with words’ together at Tweetspeak for National Poetry Month. This week, we talk about listening to ourselves.
Why Haiku: Not Just 5-7-5
The best known haiku attribute — the 17-syllable count and 5-7-5 rhythm — turns out to be its least valid attribute. Christopher Patchel explores Why Haiku.
The Novelist: What’s the Big Idea in Fiction?
How long must you lie on the floor staring at the ceiling before you’re ready to write that story? We’re discussing The Novelist by L.L. Barkat in our new Tweetspeak Book Club. Come on in and join us.
Literary Citizen, Hug a Writer!
As I sip a dark red vanilla rooibos in a Seattle teahouse and type these words, I am feeling rather smug. Today is Hug an Author Day. Already, I have hugged fourteen dead writers (via Facebook, of course. I didn’t exhume them or anything. That’s just creepy). I have also hugged five living writers, among […]
Ordinary Genius: Why the Chicken Crossed the Road
By this time, I’m ready to ask the chicken question. I’ve been scratching around for an angle, and even as I type this, I don’t have one. But Kim Addonizio tells me I don’t have to know where I’m going when I start writing, and even goes so far as to say it might be […]
Ordinary Genius: Entering Poetry (part 2)
Poetry asks for your intelligence and spirit. It is hard work, but good work. Come along with Kim Addonizio and enter poetry by working on your lines…
Poetry Classroom: Hard Road by Li Bai
Li Bai was one of China’s most important poets. Read about his intriguing life and experience one of his insightful, even subtly witty, poems.
Ordinary Genius: Book Club Announcement
You could say I’m playing around with writing a sonnet today, as long as your definition of “playing around” is broad enough to include tapping aimlessly on my desk to The Guess Who’s Bus Rider. Our Canadian columnist Matthew Kreider loaned me one of his famous Ticonderoga pencils this weekend. It keeps a terrific desktop 70s beat, […]
The Anthologist: Motion
I found Paul Chowder at the Tip O’Neill building. He was in the passport office cajoling the bureaucrats into renewing his travel documents just days before his departure to Switzerland for some big international poetry doings because he didn’t realize he’d expired. I was there for my once-a-decade passport renewal even though I had no […]
The Anthologist: Pluck the Day
I scheduled a date with Paul Chowder on Friday. We were supposed to hang out and talk about Sara Teasdale. He’d been going on about how some poets spend too much time thinking about death, like going to a movie and just waiting for the credits, which my dad taught me are very interesting if you […]
The Anthologist: Conversation in a Laundromat
I moved upstairs to the kitchen to work. I don’t like the kitchen much. It reminds me of all the times I have to cook, and cooking is not something I enjoy. Sometimes when I cook, there’s a fire, and I’m not sure the fire extinguisher was recharged after the last one. It wasn’t my […]
The Artist’s Way: Conclusion
The Artist’s Way: If growth “is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, ” we don’t need to eat a whole carp in a day.
The Artist’s Way: Process
Says Cameron in The Artist’s Way, “creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment, we are timeless.”
The Artist’s Way: Risk
When my parents brought me to the emergency room for the second time in as many weeks, they worried that, even in the 1960s, my sudden susceptibility to injury might raise suspicions of mistreatment. I already wore Raggedy Ann-like black stitches on my face after a mishap involving a swivel chair, coffee table and locked […]
The Artist’s Way: Morning Pages
At the root of a successful recovery is the commitment to puncture our denial, to stop saying, “It’s okay” when in fact it’s something else. The morning pages press us to answer what else.
The Artist’s Way: Currents
She requires a choice with every chapter. Will I sit with the pelicans and snag the easy fish, or let the current take me clear to the ocean?