A student artist’s insights about making art apply to prose. By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. . . . This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point.” …
Category: on prose writing
Anthologies Live
An Editor on the Work and Power of a Themed Collection By Erin Wood See her work in WTP Vol. V #1 In 2011, I had an idea for a book about scars. I had no idea that it would eventually take the form of an anthology, nor that in many ways, the experience would…
Writing a Persona Other than Your Own
“I had made the triple transgression of assuming the persona of someone who was of a different race, a different gender, and a different age.” By Stephen Davenport See his work in WTP Vol. V #2 According to a young editor at a New York City publishing house, my niche is 1. White. 2. Male.…
What Makes a Writer Southern?
Living in the Southern Shadow By Kelsey Asher, SFK Press If you think of writing as paint by numbers, then writers, or word painters, take to canvas and color in and out of the lines, but ultimately the landscapes they portray keep the edges they started with from the beginning, more or less. The way the…
Who are the Southern Authors of the New Millennium?
Contemporary Southern Authors and Their Subjects By Steve McCondichie, SFK Press Bless their hearts. Agents, editors, and publishers love their categories. It’s part of their tribal language. They are trained to promptly stuff readers and authors into the proper box. They call it a genre as if giving it a short French rolling sound makes…
Between Self and Story
On Hemingway and Writing By Richard Gilbert, contributing editor A writer’s sense & sensibility become, through craft, literature. Craft is the self’s conduit to art—but craft mustn’t be enshrined. If you stay in newspapers long enough, you’ll only see words.”* …
The Do's and Don'ts of Great Headings
It’s the start of a fresh year, and maybe you’re thinking about making writing a serious goal. Whether you’re pursuing freelance opportunities or gearing up to start an indie project, like a blog or a book, there’s a key element that will drive visibility. Know what it is? Here’s a hint: it’s probably the same…
Review: Annie Dillard’s Living By Fiction
Traditional vs. Modernist approaches, Fine vs. Plain prose styles By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor LIVING BY FICTION by Annie Dillard. Harper Perennial. 192 pages. The cultural assumption is that the novel is the proper home of significance and that nonfiction is mere journalism. This is interesting because it means that in two centuries our assumptions have…
Dusting Off. Moving Forward.
Chris Offutt’s writing advice resonates as America regroups By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor Cast a cold Eye On life, on death Horseman, pass by. —tombstone of W.B. Yeats When Chris Offutt was ten, growing up in an Appalachian backwater, he asked a librarian for a book on baseball. She gave him J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in…
WTP Writer: Beth Kephart
Handling the Truth by Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of over 20 books of poetry, fiction, and memoir for teens and adults. She is a partner in Juncture Workshops and a professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received the 2015 Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching…
A Story That Made Me Want to Write
On Yates’s “The Best of Everything” By DeWitt Henry, Contributing Editor I first read Richard Yates’s short story “The Best of Everything,” some fifty years ago. Yates was in his prime then as the promising author of Revolutionary Road, which he had just followed with the collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, where this story appears.…
Richard Gilbert: Word by Word
Writing’s Values—Intelligence, Sensitivity & Beauty—Challenge Me By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor “The ability to forgive oneself … is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.”—Ann Patchett English departments inherently espouse reverence for thoughtfulness, sensitivity, and comely expression. I codified this recently for myself while…