Study (the world/the craft) Archives » Page 12 of 12

Prematurity Awareness day (not what you think, men)

November 17, 2009

I try to keep this site strictly about writing-related matters, but today warrants a break from that mode. Today is Prematurity Awareness day. When my wife first told me it was Prematurity Awareness day, I thought she was trying to drop a non-so-subtle hint. “But honey, it’s because you’re so attractive,” I was going to say. But then she saved me by elaborating. Here’s what the March of Dimes site has to say: Prematurity has been escalating steadily and alarmingly over the past two decades. One out of eight babies is born prematurely in the United States. Preterm delivery can happen to any pregnant woman. My wife and I had a preterm baby in January. Born 5 weeks early, our guy had some initial troubles but has since developed into an entirely normal child. As normal as a child of my seed could be, anyway. So, how can I spread…

Xword causes Yreaction when audience = b and author = a

October 29, 2009

Note: I’m picking on poetry here because of all forms, it is the most elusive. But my following comments could be applied to art in general. Maybe because I was looking for a reason to give up on what had already proven to be an unfortunate read, but this section of The Book of Lazarus frothed all the ill-will I had toward (most) poetry: I have seen that there is no predetermined direction to the birth of a word, that words move across the page like beams of random light moving through immense voids of wandering flares. Poems are built like jewels. (pg 434) Really? Explaining what poetry is with poetic language is cyclical and confusing. I do appreciate the meta aspect of doing this (truly, I do. See here). But defining an elusive concept with further metaphor doesn’t help to define anything. Yes, the above example is from a…

Reclaim The Bar!

October 13, 2009

There still exists a romanticized version of The Bar, one whose sparse patrons restrain rich histories with liquor and silence. But by the aid of free rounds and a free ear, those histories spill. The romanticized bar is a smoky place of bonds melded by story. It has been my experience that more often the romantic bar mirage gives way to a sad reality, one of loud, obnoxious chatter with radio-friendly (re: conversationally-unfriendly) music pumped in to dilute any intellectual connection in favor of the visual/physical. Here, women dress as disco balls in hopes of MySpace photo ops. The real bar is a smokeless place of subverted and repressed stories. This isn’t a case of Norman Rockwell nostalgia; it cannot be. I am not ready to quit the dream. How to make a bar better, while maintaining profit (warning: to make this happen, compromises have been made): 1. The jukebox…

Writer Help: RSS & Really Sexy Spreadsheet

October 12, 2009

Recently, I mentioned my obsession with RSS to a writer friend, and he was surprised by its capabilities. Maybe I’m too much of a salesman when it comes to nerdy tech things, but nonetheless, I piqued his interest. That got me thinking: what writer tools do I use and unintentionally keep to myself? Selfishly-kept secret #1: RSS. You’ve likely seen this icon: This represents a link to a specific RSS feed. I won’t go over what RSS is (for that, see here). Instead, how do I use it? Simply put, I use RSS to keep updated with the many, many lit sites whose perusal would otherwise clog my day. Instead of checking each individual site for new posts, I log into one feed aggregator site (I use Google Reader) and see a list of every new post from each of my RSS subscriptions (flip through the screenshots below for a…

Fans of Sideshow Fables

August 22, 2009

When Sideshow Fables creator Paul Eckert approached a group of writers (to which Paul and I belong) about creating a magazine of circus themed tales, I said a silent thank you on the behalf of all readers. He’s got it right, I think. Going about fanbase-building and marketing in the way that independent record companies have been doing for years is a wise move when falling publisher profits has become too common a story. It was at last year’s AWP Conference in Chicago when I heard a panel of small press publishers (I can’t remember any of them, I apologize) where one of the editors made mention of the indie record label model. The publishing logic having always been, we will make readers fans of authors. But, said the editor, why not make readers fans of the publishers? It seems obvious. And to do that, readers have to be able…

The Coming (Staying?) of Metafiction…

August 15, 2009

Metafiction (see: “intertextual fiction”): self-referential fiction. A simple definition but one open to great possibilities. Think of the infinite mirror effect in that when two similar subjects are forced to reflect each other, self-commentary snowballs. For me, the pull started with Jorge Louis Borges’s story, “The Garden of Forking Paths”: “In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork…No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.” Wow. For Borges, character was secondary to plot, a tactic generally snubbed by the literateri as a convention of commercial(ized) fiction. But for Borges, the philosophical ideas were so strong that they became characters in…

Surviving Tremors: A Time of Too Many Isms?

February 22, 2009

Everybody seems to want something to shake dust and mold from assumed stagnant foundations. Ask any independent literary webzine editor what she wants and the words “original” and “new” will inevitably nestle into the response. This original and new work may come by way of various splintered isms, for better or worse. Literary isms sprout often, and lately it seems that so many of them tout the same anti-mainstream agenda. From Brutalism to The Offbeat Generation to self-depreciative referents like Joseph Ridgwell’s fictional The Shambleists, angst against the establishment propagates widely. I get it, I truly do. I’m for it. But if everything is new, will there be anything left for academia to latch onto in order to generate necessary conversation regarding trends? This is a genuine question, in want of discussion. The role of academia is to legitimize underground isms and propagate discourse about their work in order to…