Dear writers:
Happy Thanksgiving this week! I am thankful for so many
things, including living in a community that values creative work of every sort.
First order of business: December writing workshops are up
on my website today. Come one, come all, and let’s write together in person!
And also, great news that I’m really proud to share: I
signed to publish my first book with a Colorado press called Monkey Puzzle – it
is a short collection of 23 poems, a chapbook, called The Fairy Tales Mammals Tell. It is due out before Christmas. I’ll
send out more information as I have it about where to find the book.
Finally, for the medically-curious among you, here is a blog
I co-wrote with a St. Louis neurologist about alien hand syndrome and a story
we co-authored on it.
Have a wonderful holiday. May you eat well, be well, love
well.
e
PROCESS: WHALE TALE
This is the
idea that a satisfying story ends at the opposite point of where it began.
Aristotle called this the “reversal of fortune,” describing how a tragic hero’s
fortune shifts from good to bad. But this idea is useful in comedy too. I think
of it as a whale tail, a perfect 180ยบ when you find one “value” that ends a
work of art (independence, care, fullness) and then place the characters at the
beginning of the story in the value’s opposite camp (dependence, neglect,
hunger). Sometimes in a story nothing changes – that is significant, too.
Try this: File
this idea into your creative unconscious by being conscious of it as a reader: peek at the first and last page of a
book, or the first and last line of a poem, and see what those two parts say to
each other, how the second answers the first.
FEATURED VENUE:
DUOTROPE
I have found
Duotrope to be such a valuable resource for finding literary venues that it
would be a shame not to share it. It is free (for now) and provides a fairly
complete search engine for “homes” for written work.
Website here: https://duotrope.com/search.aspx
PROMPT
It ended just like it began. (12min)
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