Tuesday, November 20, 2012

November 20, 2012


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.



PROMPT

It ended just like it began. (12min)

No comments:

Post a Comment