“If you haven’t taken the Amtrak in Florida, you haven’t lived,” writes Megan Fernandes in her poem “Letter to a Young Poet,” which appears in her third collection, I Do Everything I’m Told, published by Tin House this week. The poem’s title borrows from Rainer Maria Rilke’s renowned collection of letters to a young poet seeking his guidance, published in 1929. Fernandes’s poem addresses a nameless “you” while simultaneously revealing details about the speaker, producing a sense of intimacy that presents two sides of a correspondence, its lines swerving associatively, as the pieces of advice turn increasingly lyrical. “It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you,” writes Fernandes. “Sleep upward in a forest so the animal sees your gaze.” Taking inspiration from the lyrical techniques evident in this poem, write a poem of your own that offers advice to a younger version of yourself. Instead of simply giving your younger self practical advice, how can you propose a new way to see?

In her installment of our Ten Questions series, Emma Cline talks about the imagery that first inspired her latest novel, The Guest (Random House, 2023). “The first time I saw an East Coast beach, I was so struck by the mildness of the landscape, a long stretch of dunes and the warm water and mint grasses. It looked surreal to my California eye, and I knew I wanted to write about that landscape,” says Cline. Can you recall visiting a landscape that felt entirely new to you? Write an essay that offers details of this place and your experience with it. Try to identify the feelings it conjured in you and what made it feel new.

“It was true what Mrs. Berry said: No one expected to see an old woman in a muscle car, a convertible Mustang with polished chrome bumpers, a hood scoop, and an engine that ran with a throaty hum that we could feel in that soft place just below our stomachs as she pulled alongside us one day on our walk home from school,” writes John Fulton in the first sentence of his short story “Saved,” which appears in his collection The Flounder (Blackwater Press, 2023). Consider Fulton’s nuanced description of his character and how this opens the story and write a long first sentence describing disparate aspects of a new character. What unexpected act does your protagonist experience to open your first scene?

“The poem is an opportunity to turn from memoiristic transcription of information towards a kind of ultimate artifact, charged and changed by the imagination,” says Ocean Vuong about his approach to storytelling in this interview by Kadish Morris for the Guardian. Vuong offers his poem “American Legend” as an example in which the speaker drives his father to put down their dog and crashes the car, which becomes “a kind of parable for American failure.” In actuality, Vuong does not drive but uses the story to consider relationships between fathers and sons. Inspired by this concept of imaginative writing, write a poem that deliberately alters an event in your life. How can your expansion of this event make for a deeper parable?

National Best Friend Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated on June 8 in the United States and Canada. The holiday has no official designation nor any real origin; in fact, according to a 2015 Washington Post article, this hashtag holiday likely began with the website EarthCalendar.net, which takes submissions to catalog “lesser-known holidays.” National Best Friend Day eventually caught the eye of morning TV shows, flower delivery services, and even the American Kennel Club which helped bring it to the mainstream. In honor of this invented holiday, write an essay about the best friends who have come into your life. From your childhood recess buddy to your work bestie, try to communicate what makes each one distinctly special.

In the television series Yellowjackets, members of a high school girls’ soccer team survive a plane crash in the remote Canadian wilderness and descend into savage clans to stay alive. The dark coming-of-age drama, which incorporates everything from romantic entanglements to cannibalism, brings to mind fictionalized and real-life survival stories such as William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies and the 1972 Andes flight disaster. This week write a short story in which a group of people is forced to survive in a strange and wild place. What dramas arise when the limits of human endurance are tested?

In January Gill O’Neil’s poem “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” published in the Fall 2022 issue of Rattle, the poet writes about watching the late Tina Turner sing her iconic song in a music video on MTV. “And when Tina sings I’ve been taking on / a new direction directly to the camera, / defiant, her lips glazed a tumultuous red, / she takes her hand and adjusts her / honey brown bangs out of her eyes,” writes O’Neil. This “sweeping gesture” makes a lasting impression on O’Neil as she connects the song’s message to her own experiences with love, recalling the struggles in her parents’ marriage and her own. Consider the lasting impact music has had on your life and title a poem with lyrics from your favorite song. Use these words as a jumping-off point to the memories that come with it.

Congratulations to the finalists of the ninth annual Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). The awards celebrate the best independently published books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry as well as the best literary magazines in the categories of debut and general excellence. 

clmp_logo_2.png

CLMP will announce the winners during a virtual awards ceremony on June 22 at 6:00 PM EST. Each winner in the books category will receive $1,000 to $2,000 for the press and $1,000 for the author or translator. The magazine winners will each receive $1,000. The publishers of winning books receive a free one-year membership to CLMP, and magazine winners receive a one-year CLMP member subscription to Submittable. All winners are included in a national publicity campaign. Good luck, everyone!

FICTION

Brother Alive by Zain Khalid
Grove Atlantic, July 2022

God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu
A Public Space Books, June 2022

Stories of a Life by Nataliya Meshchaninova, translated by Fiona Bell
Deep Vellum, February 2022

Violets by Kyung-sook Shin, translated by Anton Hur
Feminist Press, April 2022

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà, translated by Mara Faye Lethem
Graywolf Press, March 2022

CREATIVE NONFICTION

Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez
Coffee House Press, June 2022

Conversations with Birds by Priyanka Kumar
Milkweed Editions, November 2022

Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene by Alessandra Naccarato
Book*hug Press, October 2022

O by Tammy Nguyen
Ugly Duckling Presse, April 2022

Optic Subwoof by Douglas Kearney
Wave Books, November 2022

POETRY

Customs by Solmaz Sharif
Graywolf Press, March 2022

Look at This Blue by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Coffee House Press, March 2022

Maafa by Harmony Holiday
Fence Books, April 2022

The Rupture Tense by Jenny Xie
Graywolf Press, September 2022

Togetherness by Wo Chan
Nightboat Books, September 2022

MAGAZINES/BEST DEBUT

128 Lit

The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing

Lampblack

LIBER: A Feminist Review

Lines & Breaks

MAGAZINES/GENERAL EXCELLENCE

The Arkansas International

Ecotone

Ninth Letter

Orion

Oxford American
 

In “Once Upon a Dream,” the first essay in The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men, published in May by Catapult, Manuel Betancourt recounts the complicated feelings and moments of self-reflection that he experienced as an impressionable eight-year-old watching Disney’s classic animated 1959 film Sleeping Beauty. More captivated at first by Princess Aurora and her woodland creatures, Betancourt examines how gazing at Prince Phillip’s “slim, alluring body” startled him. “This was the first of many instances in which the silvery images on-screen kindled a growing realization that maybe I wasn’t like other boys,” he writes. Can you remember watching an animated film or television show that startled you into a new realization about yourself? Write an essay that reflects on the ways in which a particular cartoon character struck a chord with you.