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"I believe making art—and writing in particular—is not just a literary practice, but also a life practice." In this video, the first in a short series, Lidia Yuknavitch shares her experiences, tips, and philosophies on writing from the body, and writing with core metaphors.
What’s your greatest fear, your singular phobia? Is it heights, snakes, or spiders? Write an essay that investigates your phobia—not its subject, but the fear itself—across history, culture, and science. Can treatises on your fear be located in ancient texts? Or do you suffer a more modern affliction, one that says as much about you as it does about our present day? Treat the subject as a nucleus around which you can spin research, criticism, and personal perspective.
Call Me Ishmael is an innovative, multi-platform project founded by Logan Smalley and Stephanie Kent, and featured in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Readers can call a phone number, leave a message relaying a story of how a particular book has been life-changing, and visitors to a website can access over a thousand of these recorded stories. Write a personal essay you might want to record about a book that has changed your life in a small or big way. What was it about this book that impacted or inspired you? What was unique about your reading experience that you would wish to pass on to others?
One BookTuber offers his view on 2015's book lists from the New York Times to Publishers Weekly, Amazon to Goodreads. Paula Hawkins's debut novel, The Girl on the Train (Riverhead Books, 2015), James Hannaham's Delicious Foods (Little, Brown, 2015), and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) are books that top the lists.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has announced the thirty-seven recipients of its 2016 Creative Writing Fellowships in prose. Each of the fellows will receive twenty-five thousand dollars for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.
This year’s recipients are:
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Dean Bakopoulos
Bill Cheng
Diane Cook
Lucy Corin
Michael Croley
Meghan Daum
Peter Ho Davies
Jack Driscoll
Jerry Gabriel
Kaitlyn Greenidge
Rav Grewal-Kök
Paul Harding
Jamey Hatley
Kevin Haworth
Nellie Hermann
Vedran Husić
Laleh Khadivi
R. O. Kwon
Joy Ladin
Éireann Lorsung
Anthony Marra
Monica McFawn
David Philip Mullins
Lenore Myka
Dina Nayeri
Celeste Ng
Téa Obreht
Mehdi Tavana Okasi
Leslie Parry
Joseph Rathgeber
Amy Rowland
Alison Stine
Aaron Thier
Samrat Upadhyay
Melissa Yancy
Mario Alberto Zambrano
The annual grants are given to emerging and established writers and alternate between poetry and prose.
“Since its inception, the creative writing fellowship program has awarded more than forty-five million dollars to a diverse group of more than three thousand writers, many of them emerging writers at the start of their careers,” said Amy Stolls, the NEA’s director of literature programs. “These thirty-seven extraordinary new fellows provide more evidence of the NEA’s track record of discovering and supporting excellent writers.”
A group of twenty-three readers and panelists chose the recipients from 1,763 applications. The 2017 fellowships will be given in poetry; the application deadline is March 9.
The holiday season often means traveling short or long distances to spend time with family and friends. You might find yourself in a car, bus, train, subway, plane, or perhaps even a combination of several modes of transportation. Write a personal essay about an experience you’ve had while in transit during the holidays. Were there particular memories that surfaced as you looked out a bus window at the passing scenery? Did an unexpectedly funny or fascinating conversation take place with others who happened to be riding with you?
Watch the book trailer for Terese Svoboda's new biography of poet Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, which will be released by Schaffner Press in February 2016. "The Art of Biography: Falling In and Out of Love" by Svoboda is in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"What was I telling you? It was something like this: The world was made exactly for us and we'd never have to leave it." Paul Lisicky reads from his novel The Burning House (Etruscan Press, 2011) for Rosemont College's MFA Reading Series. Lisicky's new memoir, The Narrow Door (Graywolf Press, 2016), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"When I hang in the air it will be by popular demand." Brett Fletcher Lauer reads some of his poems, along with Christopher Sindt, at St. Mary's College. Lauer's new memoir, Fake Missed Connections: Divorce, Online Dating, and Other Failures (Soft Skull Press, 2016), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Sometimes the food we disliked as children—spinach, broccoli, tomatoes, raw fish, dark chocolate—we end up finding a taste for later in life. Or we end up getting tired or bored eating the same family dishes over and over, only to discover that, years later, we want to re-create them ourselves when we are in search of feel-good comfort food. Think of a specific dish or food that you used to hate but now love, or vice versa, and write a short essay about how your perceptions of it evolved over time. Describe the physical location, the atmosphere, and the people that you associate with the food, and how those elements might have changed. What do you remember about your emotional state when you ate this dish long ago? What aspects of this specific food induce your sense of nostalgia? How might your change in taste reflect other aspects of your life that have also been transformed?
