A Revision Checklist
This was the week I said goodbye to George Saunders and his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I’ve learned so much from him that I worry it will be impossible to sum up, but I have to try. So here...
View ArticleSubmission Spotlight: Guernica
As of May 2023, Guernica is currently open for no-fee submissions here (follow their link to create a free Submittable account). Founded in 2004, Guernica publishes poetry, essays, fiction, criticism,...
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Book Picks: Palmares
Palmares is marvelous. Magical realist and at times even Biblical, Gayl Jones’ novel is set in a fictional Brazil at the end of the 17th century. It opens with the young first-person narrator Almeyda,...
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Feel Like You Want to Quit Writing? Try This
I don’t know about you, but it’s easy to for me to get caught up in the old tidal wave of self-doubt. You know how it goes—I’m too old for this, I’ll never succeed at it, I’ll never publish (again),...
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Submission Spotlight: Blackbird
Okay, so the bad news is that a lot of literary magazines have closed their doors until fall. The good news? You’ve got a few months to pull up that piece you’d given up on, dust it off, and see what...
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Book Picks: The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories
I’m continuing to work my way through titles that made waves in 2021 and 2022, and this is my favorite so far. If you are in the market for masterful short stories, Jamil Jan Kochai’s collection will...
View ArticleThe Courage of Writing Nuance
One of my textbooks this semester is Words Overflown by Stars, a collection of craft essays by Vermont College MFA faculty. This week I contemplated Ellen Lesser’s essay “The Girl I Was, the Woman I...
View ArticleSubmission Spotlight: Gulf Coast
You’ve got until September, so dust off that piece that’s seen too many rejections and get to work. In three months, give it another go and consider Gulf Coast. Founded in 1986, this is the literary...
View ArticleBook Picks: The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
**Triggering Content (child abuse) Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award (yes, people, I’m still catching up on early pandemic booklists), Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ novel The Love Songs of W. E....
View ArticleDepicting Abuse in Fiction
This week I read an essay by Christopher Noël titled “Keeping Open the Wounds of Possibility: The Marvelous, the Uncanny, and the Fantastic in Fiction.” It was an approachable, hands-on review of...
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