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Using John Ashbery's poem "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name" from Houseboat Days as a model, tell a story by telling us how to tell a story. Scaffold the narrative by meditating on the nature of storytelling.
This week's creative nonfiction prompt comes from Vijay Seshadri, director of the nonfiction program at Sarah Lawrence College and author, most recently, of The Disappearances (Harper Collins, 2007).
Amy King, the author of six poetry books, including I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press, 2011), reads her poem "Lidija Dimkovska Has Made a Bomb of My Eyes" in this clip. Ugly Duckling Presse published a translation of Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers by Dimkovska, a poet from Skopje, Macedonia, in 2006.
Immerse yourself in the music, films, art, and other points of inspiration that set off the spark for our twelve debut poets of 2011.
The Grub Street literary center has created a long-form fiction class that might offer a cure for the novel-writing anxiety that the traditionally story-centric MFA workshop isn’t equipped to resolve.
In the spirit of year-end best-of reading lists, we offer Joshua Bodwell’s Baker’s Dozen 2011 as a companion to his article “You Are What You Read: The Art of Inspired Reading Lists,” which appears in the January/February 2012 issue's special section on inspiration.
The newly launched Findings, an online community that lets users compile and contribute excerpts from books and websites, joins a growing number of digital endeavors that place a new emphasis on sharing while reading.
Students in a high school Advanced English class produced this short film combining the general plot points of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby with the filmmaking style of Stanley Kubrick, specifically in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Ruminate on the past year, remembering both your achievements and your failures. Write a story about one of your failures or regrets from the perspective of someone other than yourself. Consider rewriting the past, to transform this incident into an achievement by changing the facts around it or by changing the way your protagonist perceives it.
This trailer for Alex Gilvarry's From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, forthcoming from VIking in January, has a little fun with the debut novel's rather long (and memorable?) title.
In Eowyn Ivey's debut novel, set in Alaska in 1920, a couple's lives are changed forever by the arrival of a little girl on their snowy doorstep.
