Shame and Despair

Comedy is not generated by a writer who sails to her desk saying, “Now I will be funny”. It comes from someone who crawls to her desk, leaking shame and despair, and begins to describe faithfully how things are. In that fidelity to the details of misery, one feels relish. The grimmer it is, the better it is: slowly, reluctantly, comedy seeps through.

—Hilary Mantel, from this interview in The Guardian

Call for Proposals: Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

The 2018 call for proposals is now open! Deadline May 2. Click here for more.

Three tiny exercises

Here are three tiny exercises to try if you're feeling stuck, or want to get a quick glimpse of your work from different angles. 

1.

“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.”

—Paul Cézanne

Set your timer for two minutes and write down all the emotions in which your current work began. 

2.

Do you remember the first image or two that came to you as you conceived of what you're now working on? Set the timer for two minutes and write them down. 

3.

If you could hand something to one of your main characters right now, what would it be? It can be an ordinary object, a magical object, the deed to a house, whatever occurs to you. You can give it to them in person or through another one of your characters. Five minutes.

Pyramid Scheme

". . . that great dark blue sex hope that keeps coming true

that cartoon black castle with a single bird flying over it . . . "


"Pyramid Scheme" by Hera Lindsay Bird


I think this poem is the patron saint of my new novella. 

Passion, patience, obsession

From an interview by Alexander Chee with Ursula K. Le Guin in Guernica.

New Moon Exercise

Night before last was the new moon: a good time for quiet reflection, for sitting with darkness, for planting seeds. What seeds would you like to plant for your writing? What in your writing most needs to grow over the next two weeks as the moon waxes? 

Here's an exercise: Your main character (or another you want to work with) is sowing seeds in her life. Literally or metaphorically. Show us what she's doing. It can be a tiny thing, throwing an apple core into the woods by the roadside . . . a big undertaking like planning a bank robbery . . . anything . . . Set your timer for fifteen minutes, begin with the idea of planting, and go from there.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove a poem must ride on its own melting

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.


—Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”