Tweets can Be Poems, Too By Joyce Peseroff, Contributing Editor After 18 months of retirement, I finally unpacked the last box of books from my office at UMass Boston. I found books by colleagues; duplicate volumes of collected poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Kenyon (I absolutely needed both at home and at…
Tag: creative writing
Site Review: Trish Hopkinson
The Un-“Selfish Poet” by Emily Jaeger, Features Editor Blogger and poet Trish Hopkinson immediately sets the spunky and erudite tone for her site with the subheading: “The Selfish Poet.” This head-on foray into the world of semi-promotional, semi-informational poet websites is both witty and refreshing in its honesty. Hopkinson does devote half of her site (2/4…
WTP Writer: Jacqueline Crooks
Short-story author and novelist Jacqueline Crooks Looking Back on 2016 Interview by Jo Ely, Contributing Editor Jacqueline Crooks is a Jamaican-born, British short-story writer whose main subjects are migration and Caribbean subcultures. Crooks is A Wasafiri Prize runner-up, and the first chapter of her novel Fire Rush was published by Granta (WW15, the Anthology of New Writing,…
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…
Site Review: VIDA Women in Literary Arts
A Literary Watchdog by Emily Jaeger, Features Editor In the online literary arena, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts stands apart. Many literary websites promote individual artists, curate resources for writers, or are literary journals. VIDA, however, takes on the unique role of watchdog for gender equity in literary publication. The VIDA Count, which the site…
Book Review: Know Thyself
“A poet writes to continue asking questions” By Ruth Lepson, poet-in-residence at New England Conservatory of Music It takes nerve to write homophonic renderings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, yet that’s exactly what Joyce Peseroff has done in one section of her well-crafted, complex recent book of poems: Like a granite island quarried to oblivion, her husband’s memory…
Featured Bookmarks: The Literary
January 2017 By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor Monthly link highlights to online resources, magazines, and author sites that seem informative and inspiring for working writers. Most are free. Suggestions are welcomed. The Nervous Breakdown Brad Listi, based in Los Angeles, is the founding editor and creator of The Nervous Breakdown (TNB), an influential, informative, and engaging…
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…
Site Review: Devise Literary
An Emerging Website by Emily Jaeger, Features Editor Devise Literary, a site spearheaded by emerging fiction writers Alexandra Stanislaw and Drew Wade, originally began as “a way to gather resources for writers.” However, since its initiation in 2015, the site has already evolved to include a seasonal literary magazine open to creative work and literary…
WTP Writer: Charlotte Holmes
Into the Grass Labyrinth Interview by Emily Jaeger, Features Editor Charlotte Holmes is a writer, a poet, and a teacher of creative writing. Her first book, Gifts and Other Stories, was published in 1994. Published by BkMk Press in 2016, her new collection of stories, The Grass Labyrinth, has been hailed as “a contemporary classic.” Holmes received…
Review: Salena Godden's LIVEwire
“This is not a Eulogy” by Jo Ely, Contributing Editor Poetry conveyed in album form is a natural extension of a thriving UK performance scene, of poets collaborating with other artists and sometimes musicians. It should be no surprise that poet Salena Godden, author of Springfield Road, Fishing in the Aftermath, and contributor to The…
Eye on the Indies
A Look at Indie Authors and Their Publishers By Lanie Tankard, Book Review Editor Book: Where’s the Moon?: A Memoir of the Space Coast & the Florida Dream College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, November 2, 2016 ($26.00 paperback, 224 pages, 29 B&W photos, index). ISBN 978-1-62349-450-6 Author: Ann McCutchan Ann McCutchan is an essayist and journalist…