Resources
From Category:
An Interview with Mina Manchester, Judge of the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest
ANNIE: Hello, and welcome. I'm Annie Mydla, managing editor of Winning Writers, and I'm joined today by Mina Manchester, final judge of our Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. Mina holds an MFA and is a working writer, as well as an editorial assistant at independent publisher Great Place Books. She's currently working on a short story collection as well as her debut novel. Mina, welcome.
MINA: Thank you so much, Annie, for having me. It's a pleasure.
In your eyes as the judge, the head judge of Tom Howard/John H. Reid, what makes a great story or essay?
That's my favorite question, because that's why I sit down at my desk every day: to discover that. A story that resonates with me emotionally is always going to rise to the top, whether I laugh or cry, and I love stories that have a real concise tightness to them—some of the basics, like I can see a beginning, middle, and end.
But I also love stories that are like life—stories that have dimension, conflict, and contrast. A story that just hits the same piano key over and over is not going to be as interesting to a reader as one that has highs and lows. So I think that's really important for people submitting to take into consideration with the work that they're submitting: we are looking for that texture and dimensionality, and that tightness of the overall story. Nothing extraneous. I also love stories where it really feels like the author knows what this story is about, and I'm just ready to go on that journey.
One of the things that I talked about with Lauren in her interview is that, at least for the Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest, it's clear that some of the poets submitting are writing the poems more to process things from their personal lives than with the actual reader in mind, and the reader's experience of the words on the page. Do you find that at all in the Tom Howard/John H. Reid entries?
This is a question that I think is central to being an artist and a creator, and it's something that I've struggled with for many years: are you writing for yourself, or are you writing for an audience? I've toggled back and forth, and I think—here's my real thing, okay?—this is what I've come to after many years: it's both.
As you mature as an artist in your craft, and you learn more, you are able, through muscle memory and your craft abilities, to make the work ready for the reader. So, I personally believe that the work should always be for you.
The best writing advice I ever got was from my first writing teacher, who said, "Write where it's hot." My best work is always something that I'm trying to work out or deal with, or it's really hot, whether I feel good or bad about it. And I think that hotness comes through in the material. And then, I think, it's just a matter of, to what degree are you executing on the craft abilities that make it appealing for your reader?
Are there any patterns that you see appearing in the Tom Howard/John H. Reid entries?
As I've done [judging] for more years, I see that different writers are at different places in their writing journey. There are some commonalities with writers who are more early on in developing their material, where there is sort of a looseness or a bagginess with the story, or the transitions don't really work, or the characters aren't totally, fully fleshed out. Or sometimes the material is a little cliché, or it's not really a hot take.
I really feel empathetic to creators who are working on that, because that's part of the journey. You don't always know when you're writing something that a lot of other people are writing about. A great example was during the pandemic and the lockdown. We just saw tons of stories about that from everybody's different take. And just as someone who's reading literally thousands of those stories, it does get a little repetitive.
So, I just think in terms of advice for submitters: we've seen a lot of different thematic material that does get repetitive. I think one thing Annie and I were talking about earlier is that we've seen a lot of Boomers writing about aging and dying and sick parents. And I expect that we're going to see another wave of that with the Millennials, and even Gen Z, talking about how their familial relations are.
And so that's great, and we love those stories—I think it's just trying to figure out, how is your story in your unique voice? And what makes your set of circumstances really different?
I think the way to do that is to read a lot. Even in my own life—I write about, sometimes, parenting or motherhood, and it feels really hot and fresh to me, because I'm experiencing it. Then I'll read more and I'll be like, "Oh yeah, this is pretty universal." And that's not to say that universal is bad, because honestly, appealing to the universal is the goal. Like, full stop. But how do you do that in a way that's really engaging and interesting? For me, it's through specifics, through details.
I imagine that a lot of writers are also writing about things that they feel in the cultural zeitgeist, for example, identity politics and so-called "political correctness". How do you see those topics as factoring into the Tom Howard/John H. Reid entry pool?
I think it goes to a question of authenticity. For me, I'm Scandinavian-American, I'm a woman, I'm white, I'm cisgender, I'm straight—mostly!—I'm a wife, I'm a mother, a daughter, a friend. And when I'm reading entries, I really try to be aware of [my] possible biases, of blind spots. So anything that touches on those topics, I try (even though it's all read blind, of course) to have an extra degree of scrutiny to counteract familiarity with material or themes.
I try to also be extra gentle with things that might be more outside of my purview, and I work closely with Jendi to get sensitivity readers or educate myself more if it's something that's not as much in my wheelhouse.
I do think it's really important to elevate other voices, like trans voices and LGBTQ voices, people of color, and disability voices. I've dealt with chronic illness in my life and my kids' lives, and trans identity in my family, and so those are just really important, and we don't see enough of those stories.
And then I will also say as a caveat to all of that as an artist. I think that our society is trying to figure out the role that identity plays in everything in our lives, and where should we be sensitive. I think, as an artist, it's important to also just totally disregard it and write what you're going to write, right? Everyone has the right to write anything, and that's the freedom of being an artist. That's also the sacrifice that we take on when we become artists: that people aren't necessarily going to like it.
I think it's really brave, and it's important. So really, don't self-edit yourself. Be brave with what you're going to write and let the chips fall. And of course, another caveat—we don't want to see violence or disturbing material that is difficult for a number of reasons.
Something that I think it's also important to mention as a judge, reading so many of these submissions year after year, is that a lot of it is about the author's worst day, or something really traumatic that happened to them. And that makes sense. That's why we're writing—we're trying to understand human suffering and these experiences. That's just also a lot to absorb as a judge, and I have to protect my mental health.
I'd like to see more stories that are about the happiest day of someone's life, or just about a normal day of someone's life, and have that sort of dimensionality. Bad things happen too, and I'm not saying write light or fluffy material, but I'm just saying, maybe get into it from a different lens that is a bit more like life.
And don't worry—I do have like a lot of strategies to take care of myself so that I don't feel too sad all the time. I take breaks, and I have a lot of support.
I really admire the authenticity of the pieces that you choose as winners and honorable mentions for the contest.
I try to just read for what is the best, without thought of duplicates [entries that take on similar topics in similar ways] or anything like that. Then, when I go back through, sometimes hard decisions at the very end are when two stories of pretty equal merit are sort of on the same topic or theme. That's the heartbreak for me, because I do like to have diversity in theme and subject matter.
I think sometimes that's also sort of necessarily why those pieces are winning, because they do lean into their specific experiences. Like this year, we have a veteran or an active military member, and we have a nurse from the past, someone who is adopted, someone who's working with the Deaf community. I think the more specificity about your particular experiences that are in the story, the better.
There tends to be a focus on unanswerable questions in your picks, I've noticed. For example, from this year, there's this unbridgeable gap in understanding between a veteran, their community, and basically themselves, in [2024's] fiction winner, "Cryptozoology". And then in the essay winner, "Memory in Tibet", there's this unsolvable problem of grueling child labor and what it does to children in these villages versus, community survival. What is it about these unanswerable questions that makes them so attractive in short fiction and short nonfiction?
I love this question. I feel like for me, even the work I gravitated toward as a small child—I think life is pretty unanswerable, and circumstances, and the fates, seem random. I also think human life is very complex, and we have these beautiful big brains, and we're just a mass of contradictions. I love work that captures that messiness and that explores all of it.
The work that I don't [tend to] like is too simplistic, and that doesn't feel realistic to my life experience. I feel like life is really hard for most people, and we're all just trying to do our best. I like to learn from the choices that people make, or how they're trying to be better.
Like, god, I love a character who's flawed and just trying their best, because I feel like that's me! I relate to that. I'm not perfect, I'm so deeply flawed, and am I trying my best every day? Probably not, but I do try, and I really relate to that.
You are also a working author, you make a lot of submissions, and you do a lot of writing. I'm wondering if the judging has influenced your own work, and if your own work has influenced your judging.
Oh yes, definitely, yes. And yes, I love coming back to judge this contest every year. It comes at a certain time for me in the summer, and it really helps me to dig back into it, because it's just always such a good reminder of what stories need to be. All of the good material inspires me.
I want to say, especially for submitters, one thing that really warms my heart is when a piece I've seen has been submitted or even longlisted in the past, and then the author has gone back for the last year and revised it and reworked it, and maybe worked with other editors or writing groups, and workshopped it, and made it better, and then resubmitted it. There's a great example from a piece that did win in the past, a nonfiction piece, "Manny" by Elizabeth Becker. I had seen that piece before, liked it, and longlisted it. Then she went back and worked on it, and it won. To me, that is the work of a writer. This is a long game.
And yeah, it does help me with my own work. I am a judge, but I'm also judged in everything that I submit. So it helps me to see what is good and what doesn't work, and then I take that back to my own work and try to make my own work better. So really, this is a gift to me. I feel very, like—"I'll take it!" Because writing is very lonely and isolating, and when I submit to things with my own work, sometimes months, or even a year, will go by, and I will hear nothing.
I think for me, even hearing a rejection, or just getting a few sentences, a few words, of feedback, whether good or bad, is better than just the deafening silence. Wherever we can help each other as writers to get feedback [is valuable]. Work with friends, or work with other writers on your work. I think it just really helps you move forward and can help deal with that loneliness and isolation and get more eyes on what you're doing.
It's worthy. It's okay to be vulnerable. Do it! Just do it. Just let me encourage you to do it.
Can you talk a little bit about the things that you're working on right now?
Yes, I'm excited! I'm working on a story collection which was my thesis at my MFA program—shout out to Sewanee School of Letters!—and it was a finalist for the Santa Fe Writers Prize this spring. And the judges, bless their hearts, sent me some feedback, and so I'm working on that right now and revising it and submitting it around.
And then I have a novel that I wrote, also at Sewanee, and I've been revising for the last couple of years, so that has been sort of out on submission to a couple of different agents and editors. I'm getting some feedback on that and hoping that someone will want to take it out for me, which would be really exciting.
I graduated with my MFA just thinking, "Oh, I'm ready. I'm going to get a job in publishing, and I'm get my novel out there." And the reality is, years go by. I always need to reset my own perspective with, "This takes a really long time," and slow myself down, and just be like, "The material is going to take the time that it takes."
Now, because I'm so invested, I'm so far down the rabbit hole. I'm like, "Take the time!" Because I want it to be the best it can be. I want the book to be all it can be for readers, and for what I can do. That, to me, is the most exciting challenge right now.
It's worth taking time, because the book will live on. The book is not mortal like we are.
You're an editorial assistant at Great Place Books, the independent publisher and I just wanted to ask you a little bit about that work and any overlap that it may have with being a judge for Tom Howard/John H. Reid.
I'm so glad that you're asking, because this is definitely my soap box I think as an emerging writer—and I feel like all of us at some point spend a lot of time as an emerging writer—I think most of the submitters to this contest are kind of in the trenches with me on this! In the last ten years, we've seen just such a constriction of publishing options for ourselves. We have five publishers, which do have multiple imprints, but it's really hard to get in. And there's also just a proliferation of writers because we had time during the pandemic, we have digital tools, we're able to self-publish. Amazon has changed the landscape.
So what I'm excited by, that I'm seeing now, is the rise of some new indies. And, as a writer who maybe tends toward the more artistic or literary or eccentric, I think it's really important to have more submission opportunities, and I think the indies are leading the way.
Great Place Books is certainly one of them. We're new, we're small, we're scrappy. We take three titles a year, so it's not a volume game for us. One prose book, one book in translation, one book of poetry. Send your stuff! We promise we'll read it. Go to our website. You can submit.
I read submissions there, and then help, once we do have our chosen titles, with some copy editing and getting them out there. And we really support our writers. We want to support you!
As a writer who's trying to publish my own work, I just think indies are doing really great work. I would die to be published by an indie. They give such careful attention, consideration, and thoughtfulness to work, and I think most of us have spent literally almost decades, or more, of our lives on this work, so that's really, really important and necessary and beautiful.
I'm wondering if the evaluation activity differs. Do you have to have slightly different mindsets when you are working at these two different places?
Oh, yes. I love that we're talking about this right now, and all these different platforms and audiences, because it is all different.
For example, just as an individual in my life, I do developmental and copy editing for different writers privately. I work one-on-one with people. Right now, I have a client that's writing a memoir, and I'm helping with developmental edits and trying to get to a first draft. This writer has published before with big presses, and that's just the stage this particular project is at.
With the [Tom Howard/John H. Reid] contest, it is a lot more about what's already on the page, because we don't have the ability or the setup to go back and forth with the author to change anything. When I was a fiction editor at Five South, we did. I could choose pieces, and I could email the author, and famously did with E. P. Tuazon—an amazing Filipino American writer. We made a couple substantial tweaks to his story, and that became the title story of his collection, A Professional Lola, which won the Red Hen AWP Prize two years ago. I feel really proud of that editorial shepherding. I guess in that case, he was very open to it, and I think we both felt together that that story had found its true home, like it was already leaning there, and we just sort of helped guide it.
I think that's one of my editorial signposts or lighthouse, or whatever you want to say, where I really feel like the work is trying to tell you what it wants to be, and you have to be quiet and still, and listen, and try to see what's there, talk with the author, try to figure out where it's going, what it wants to be. Sometimes that process can be difficult, and sometimes it's hampered by where the craft abilities are for that particular artist.
But yeah, with Great Place Books, that's more like the [Tom Howard/John H. Reid] contest in the sense that [the book] has to be totally ready. I feel bad about it, actually. What it means is there's so much good stuff that is so, so close that I have to turn down, and that makes me feel bad, because I know what it's like to be on the other side of the table and have a novel that's getting these close rejections.
We do give feedback if it's a project that's so, so close like that. The co-founders of the press, Alex Higley and Emily Adrien, will give feedback, which is really amazing of them, because they're taking their own time for free to do that, and they're self-funding this whole company, which is incredible. They have a lot of experience in the indie world as well, and teaching, and they're just wonderful souls.
It is hard [for writers], because as a writer, when you submit, people just don't really have the time in the current publishing economy to edit or make changes. You have to really pay for that. So you're spending thousands of dollars to work with people you trust, and who have the tools to help you get what you want, just to get that finished, polished manuscript ready to go.
I get the sense that a lot of writers who are just starting out don't understand how extensive the editing and revision process truly is for a successful piece, and I know that you must see that in the story and essay contest. So I want to ask you as someone who's also an editor and who works with people to develop their writing all the time: do you ever feel conflicted when you see a contestant that has opportunities for improvement? And what is that like emotionally—as a judge, but also as an editor?
Oh yeah, it's just heartbreak all around. Sometimes it's, frustration, too, honestly, because sometimes it's like, "Oh, why did this person submit it? It's too early"!" if it's not formatted correctly, or if they haven't read the guidelines, or listened to [the guidelines]. And honestly, the person that that's hurting the most is the writer and the person who submitted it. If they had taken more time, like we were talking about earlier, it would have gotten there.
But then there's another part of me that's like, "This is just the process!" You've got to start submitting early on, and get used to it, and build up your thick skin, and get better. And it's okay. I think we've all been there, and it's no shame, no big deal.
One thing that really helps me as a submitter is having a pretty good, I guess you would say, "group text" of other writers who support me and who cheerlead for me. I can screenshot my rejections to them, and they're like, "Oh, you'll get it next time!" And I do the same for them. That support is really crucial, because it also helps you learn things. If somebody in my circle gets into Bread Loaf, I'm like, "Send me your app! I want to read it! Like, what did you do?" because I want to learn from that and see what was successful.
And even though my envy rears its ugly head if a friend wins a big prize or contest, or gets a publishing contract—there was a friend from Sewanee for whom I edited the very first draft of her book, and now it's coming out, which is really exciting. I want to see what has been done there, and where the book did get edited, and where it's changed, because that's useful for me to learn as well.
Annie, you were mentioning earlier that through your work, what you're so interested in is the middle: the pieces that aren't super early/just kind of first effort, and they're not on the other end, honorable mentions or finalists, or super polished, or even longlisted, but the stuff that's more in the middle. I would just say for me personally, that was just a really hard decade in my own work! I was workshopping a lot. I would write something that day and email it that day to three people, because that's just a period where you have to make a lot of growth.
I will say this like advice, I guess: Go get an MFA! Go sign up for every workshop or class you can, and just have that accountability, and read a lot in a structured way, where you're workshopping other people's stuff and getting your stuff workshopped. I think that's how you [get out of the phase] of, like, "Here I am sitting at my desk just hitting my head on the wall every day." If you're with other people, you can slingshot into the future.
We all have commitments outside of this work. We have paying jobs, right? We have full-time commitments. We have families. We have stuff we have to do. And so fitting in the creative work outside of that is very difficult. If you have a class or a residency or workshop, that can be a way to prioritize your work.
It's so wonderful that as an editor, a reader, and a writer, you can bring all these experiences to bear as a judge, and to have this really comprehensive, humane approach to judging.
That's what I really like about working with Winning Writers in general. It's a community where we're sort of similar-minded about that, and it is about being gentle. There's a lot of stuff in art that isn't gentle, and so I think I sort of gravitate toward that. I guess it is a personal value, personal philosophy. Why be mean when you can be kind?
I also really like the way that you're talking about different things that authors can do to cope with the pressures of writing in their own daily lives.
Just in case it is difficult for anyone else, I think I'm definitely a poster child for trying to take care of yourself, because it's such a long game. How do you really stay in it for the long game and protect yourself? Because at least for me, it's not something I'm going to do once, or in my twenties, and then abandon.
So now, as a mom, as a parent, as someone who has to pay the mortgage and taxes, I do have to really be careful about how I think about my life, and how I have this practice that's so important to me. How do I fit it in in a way that's meaningful and lasting, and that isn't going to burn me out, and that I can do until I'm hopefully a hundred?
I was just wondering if you have any parting insights for writers who might be in the process of preparing their entries for Tom Howard/John H. Reid right now.
Do your research. Find someone whose work you love, where you think that their work can help your work. Do the work, get the draft, and then have your trusted readers that won't lie to you read it. And depending on what they come back with, you may need to go back to a drawing board again.
Before we go, your publisher, Great Place Books, is open for submissions, right?
We are, we are, yes. Go to greatplacebooks.com. Check out our website. You can submit. I can't promise that we'll take it, since we take very few titles per year, and we're also looking into the future now, but we will definitely read it.
Thank you so much. And the link for Great Place Books is going to be in the video description. Mina, it's been such a pleasure and so enriching to talk to you. I really appreciate the time that you took.
Thank you for having me.
What makes a winning humor poem? An interview with Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest judge Lauren Singer
ANNIE: Hello, and welcome to my blog. Today we have a very special guest, Lauren Singer, the assistant judge of our Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest. Lauren is also a judge of our North Street Book Prize and she's a past judge of our Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. She's had work published in many magazines and journals, she's a former Honorable Mention winner of our Wergle Flomp contest in 2011, and her book-length poetry manuscript, Raised Ranch, will be published by Game Over Books in August of 2025. Lauren, thank you so much for being here. Welcome.
LAUREN: Thank you for having me.
First of all, a lot of us are curious about just the experience of being a humor poetry contest judge. I mean, poetry contest is unique enough, but a humor poetry contest? You must see a lot of interesting things.
You know, what makes some something funny has to be about the voice of the writer, because anything can be funny. I mean, you can write about the most serious components of your life and turn them into funny, and I think that the way we do that is by zooming in on the specific and making that relatable.
I think for me, funny is a humanistic quality, because there's so much darkness in our world, and, laughter being medicine, which I believe is a real thing, we have to find ways to relate to each other. For me, that's making something really absurd, really dark, really grievous. Something that we can laugh at, because it is a connector. It's like connective tissue.
There are obviously some entries, several hundred per year, that really are delightful and that you end up choosing. So which really delight you, and how do you know when you're really delighted by a poem?
It's slice-of-life stuff that really gets me. It's like zooming in on something that is mundane, or that we encounter on an everyday basis, and making it ours. You know, like sharing it in this way that is personal, and ridiculous, and touching. The poems that I find the funniest are also the ones that like, pull on my heartstrings a little bit, and that's sort of like a magic-potion-sort-of equation for me.
Two of my favorites this year were actually about the very specific experience of pulling over to the side of the road having to pee, and being caught in the act of that by someone, in one case I think the police. And then in another, having to do it in front of your family because there's no other option. I think it was from the perspective of someone very like poised and curt. And it's those sorts of things, the things that we encounter on an everyday basis, that all of us can relate to, and most of us don't think to write a poem about. Those are the things that I think really stick out to me.
There are a couple of those this year on the winning entries page, like "I'd Like to Donate It to the Library," about a woman who's just donating a lot of random stuff to the library. I definitely recommend that people read that. There's a poem in the Honorable Mentions called "I'm Living Laughing and Loving."
Oh my god, there was one this year, I think it was about having a really harsh internal critic, and this writer made a reference to the Nicholas Cage remake of Wicker Man, and then just wrote in there somewhere, "Not the bees." And I laughed so hard because it's those little Easter eggs that I love. It's like the poet is saying, "You have to dig deep into the thing that I'm referencing here, and you also have to know that it's funny without me telling you." That's another big trope, that people are constantly submitting poems about why they're funny, and telling us, and trying to convince us that they're funny, when someone else is subtly just speaking to their own life experience, or speaking to something observational.
I also really love observational narrative poems. That always gets me, where we don't have to do any work of being convinced, we're just sharing in an observation with someone, and that's all.
A really good humor poet kind of knows what their audience is going to find funny, and also knows whether the audience has the references or not and is able to just go directly into that super specific territory, just like two friends who are saying this goofy line together that they've been saying for the past twenty years that doesn't make sense to anybody else. It's that sense of intimacy and trust. It's automatic.
Absolutely. I think there is. And that's what I love about poems like that, is that there is an implicit sense of trust that is not there with those other poems that are like, "Hey, I need you to know that what you're about to read is going to be really funny! In fact, this whole poem is about why I am!" Versus this very sort of niche trope that is in the internal fabric of this chaotic world that we're all weaving together.
And one thing I want to say about that specifically is that I'm—as much as we try to not be biased, I'm a person in the world and I have my own biases. I think I was twenty-three when I submitted to Wergle Flomp, and I started judging when I was in my mid-twenties. And the poems that were my favorites back then have certainly changed over the course of a decade. I think I would veer towards poems about online dating, which there's always tons of, or being really broke and not being able to afford your rent, which like, I can still relate to, but it's a little different these days.
And then the ones that I'm relating to more now are [different.] I used to just completely glaze over any "my body is changing because I'm aging" kind of poems. I still don't love those, because there's a lot of, I want to say, like, harshness and ugliness in those poems, but the poems that really embrace aging, embrace, like coming to terms with the seasons of your life, those I tend to love.
One of my favorites this year, I forget what it was called, but it was something similar to that book, A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, but it was a mid-to-late-thirties guide to bird watching. It was about this new experience of being in your mid-to-late-thirties and really appreciating birds in a way that you never had before, and you're like, "Ah, like suddenly, I can suddenly hear their call and know who's speaking to me! And I really want a crow to leave me a shiny bauble!" I'm like, I feel that so hard.
It's like those sort of, yeah, those inside jokes that I think I'm going to relate to in a different way a much younger reader is going to relate to, or Jendi might relate to, being a bit older than me. So it's subjective, also, the experience of judging.
Yes, and this is why we have the poetry archives on Winning Writers. Not just the poetry archives, but all the winning entries from all of our past contests are still published and visible on winningwriters.com. And we have bios of the judges, we're very transparent about who the judges are and what they do. Contestants can read all the entries that you guys have selected in the past, but they can also go and read your stuff if they want, to know what you're into, the kind of stuff that really makes you laugh or cry.
I always say this in every interview with everybody, but a message to the potential entrants is, just do your research. [Entering a literary contest doesn't have to be] a shot in the dark. You really have an opportunity to kind of know the judges, and get specific with the judges, and have those inside joke moments, even if you've never met. So think about who you're writing for. And I hope this interview also will help people to just get a better sense of that.
I'm always like, "Butter me up! Appeal to me!" Like send me some X-Files poetry or whatever! If you can find an encounter with everyday life, and make that funny, that's going to strike me every time.
A lot of people who submit poems are probably talking about a lot of the same things. Do you find that to be true?
Yes, yes. The zeitgeist is very much about what's going on in the world, and that thematically enters in every single year. So election cycles tend to give us an overpowering amount of political poems. Covid was a dark landscape of people on all sides of the spectrum, of their thoughts and beliefs about Covid.
It was about Covid, but it was also about people tending to write about the same stuff that we also tend to see everywhere in social media. Like toilet paper, for example, was a huge subject.
Toilet paper, the bodily functions in the lower half of the body.
Well, I mean, we like a good fart, we like diarrhea in Wergle Flomp. We're not against those things, but in the Covid context it got a bit repetitive.
And I tire of the coprophilic poems after a while, where I'm just like, how much more can I read about someone's gastric issues? I lose steam.
Yeah, if there's no original angle, it's a bit difficult. Or with the political stuff, the two candidates that people have been focusing on—the age, the orangeness of one of the candidates, you see that all the time [in the entries].
So I actually included that in my Wergle notes that I wrote this year. I banned any more poems that included "rhymes with orange," and so much of that was in reference to one of these candidates. Also the word "orange" in poems at this point, unless we're talking like, the actual, like peeling of an orange.
To your very good list I would also add social media tropes, just the stuff that's hot on social media, the different hashtags and stuff. That stuff can be current, but if it's too in the public eye, it kind of loses the novelty.
The political horizon is a huge one, like major news events. Oh, and so much AI this year. So much AI, so much ChatGPT came into the poems. I think people write a lot about aging, and marriage, and child-rearing and raising. And thematically I think we get thousands of poems about things people hate about their bodies, things people want to change about their spouses. Those tend to kind of blur together because they're so en masse.
There are a lot of entries about coffee. There are a lot of entries that start out as a love poem, and the person rhapsodizes on a subject, and then at the end it gets revealed that it's coffee, or "my car," or "my dog," or something like that.
At this point I completely just glaze over certain kinds of parodies. There are so many, "It was the night before something," and the same is true for the parodies of Robert Frost, and "with apologies to…" etc., etc. You have to really win me over for me to give that a second glance.
I think a lot of entrants also confuse humor with other good feelings, so there are a lot of poems we get, for example, love poetry, and some of it's ambiguous whether it's a humor poem or not. People are enumerating the things they like about another person and how they make them feel, and it's definitely light-hearted, it's definitely kind and nice and pleasant, but is it humor poetry? What do you think about when you see entries like that?
It's funny, because I think that we get a lot of parodies of that poem "What I'm made of," like the recipe for "what makes me, me," basically, and I never know if those are intentionally supposed to be funny. Sometimes there's a punchline and it's very obvious that they are; other times it's like you said, it's just this sort of description of love and joy, and I want to be like, "That's really great, I love that you love these things. Now tell me how I can relate to that in a way that is going to make me laugh."
In some ways I think people just want to kind of share the abundance of the things that they love, and I think that there is light-heartedness. I never get mad at those poems…but it loses the plot a little bit when there isn't an invitation to poke fun. The ones that work are these really zoomed in niche descriptions of something that you love really deeply that someone else might not.
This is a silly one, but there were like lots of like odes to… what are those robo vacuums called?
Roomba!
Right. Every so often I would encounter one that really made me laugh, because [the robot] was personified by these characteristics that someone might want in a partner or pet. It's this description of something that's like super helpful and everyday basic and still inviting us in, to be like, "Have you ever fallen in love with a vacuum? Even just a little bit?" And it's like, yeah, I have. That's the part where I want to relate to that, and be like, yes, that's awkward.
Like you say, it's all about the context. Maybe a person is describing themselves in this poem like "What am I made of," and maybe to them it's hysterical because it's the opposite of who they actually are, so they're writing it laughing, like, "Haha, you know, this is really ironic" or something. But there's no way for you as a judge to know that, because it's not written down on the page.
So I would add for people, along with "Do the research on the judges" also remember, all they can see of you is the words that you put on the page. So if you're writing a poem about spiritual enlightenment or you're writing a poem just describing something you really like, and you are thinking to yourself, oh this is great, this is so funny, remember: If it depends on context that's still inside your head or heart to be funny, Lauren and Jendi can't see it, and they don't know. So remember to leave that context on the page.
I would say the same is true when you're inciting all of this joy into your poem, the same is also true for like really disturbing commentary. You know, every so often we get a poem that's clearly supposed to be funny, but it's describing like a murder or something really, really gruesome. And there have been some amazing poems about end of life and chronic illness and cancer, and things like that, and that is not what I mean here. I mean very specifically like a violent scenario that is supposed to be hilarious. That's never going to get me. Like, that's never—I'm never going to find that funny. There's just no world in which you describing murdering your ex is going to make me laugh, just across the board.
I was going to bring up that exact topic, because we do get a certain number of poems each year that are violent. Revenge fantasies, abuse fantasies, like doing like any kind of abuse, physical abuse, on other people. You were kind of getting in this direction earlier, when you were talking about the body image poems, because there can be these very ugly things creeping into these poems, like this self-hatred. And desire for revenge—you know, not a desire for revenge as in, "Oh, the person who wants revenge is so ridiculous" kind of idea, it's really this hate-driven desire for revenge that this person wants to enact on the page.
My assistants and I, we go through a lot of these, and we write an email to every single person who submits a humor poem to the contest when we think this is a serious poem and not a humor poem. And you would be shocked at the number of times that we get emails back when we've contacted someone who's written a very, very serious or disturbing poem, and they say, "This is funny! How could you not think this is funny?" and I never know how to take that. How does it make you feel that people across the world are entering a humor poetry contest with some very, very dark and serious stuff?
I'm of two minds about this. My one thought that I used to think was true across the board, was that because we are an international contest and because we are a free contest, that sometimes people just miss the mark and they don't read the instructions, and they're like, "Oh, free contest! It's so rare that we have a free contest! I'm just going to submit." And you know, either "I don't know that this is supposed to be a humor contest," or "I don't care and I'm banking on the fact that this is good and should be shared, and I want to just put it somewhere."
I think that there are certainly hundreds of people who do that, right, they just don't read the instructions. And I also think that there are probably lots and lots of people who know that their poem is going to be read regardless, and just need to share with someone.
Jendi and I have talked about this [and wondered whether there might be a way] to reach out and say, like, "Hey," especially for the ones that were really poignant and good, and say, "There's a reader for this somewhere. It's not this contest, but we want you to keep doing this." There were so many times that I wanted to reach out with support, and be like, "This isn't the place to put this, but there is a place to put this." And also, there are certainly the ones that are super dark and painful, but also have overt humor, and those tend to be some of my favorites.
Yes, It's such a fine line, because it is all about the specificity. And one of the reasons that humans invented humor in the first place, everyone knows, is because we need to escape from these really crazy and dark situations that we find ourselves in our lives. Humor is in reaction to pain and grief and loss and horror. Humor bubbles up in the human spirit. But when only the dark parts of the situation are getting in [to the poem], it's maybe not quite to that point where humor can be found in that situation, in the poem.
You're a poet and a lot of your poetry is also informed by grief and loss and some very, very dark and very, very human things. But whenever I read your poetry, like on your Instagram account, I have noticed that they also have a lot of humor in them. I always find myself with these really complex and rewarding emotions when I read your work, because as a poet you do the leg work to find all these different angles of the situation and bring them together in very specific and immersive language. So how do you do that, and, in your opinion as a poet and a judge, how can sadness and humor coexist in poetry?
It's such a good question, and it's a two-part question, so I'll start with the personal and then I'll relate it to judging in the second half. I feel grateful that as a trauma survivor of a diverse spectrum, I have always had writing as an outlet. There has never been a time in my life that I didn't have a notebook and access to this sort of imagined world that I could just jump right into and make mine. So I feel like that has been such a precious gift and necessity of my life for survival.
And then as I got a little bit older, encountering things like having a chronically sick parent, and then divorce, and a sister who passed away, there was so much meat. And I was like, "I can't keep writing about all of this darkness and not accessing the humor in it."
As a little kid, I realized that if I'm going to be more palatable, I need to be pleasing. And the easiest access to that when you're like a traumatized little kid is to be funny. And so that sort of came naturally. I was like, "If I just talk about how bummed out I am all the time, and how, you know, sad my life is, no one's gonna want to hang out with me." But if I'm like, "You know, hey, I'm really bummed out, and also aren't we all kind of bummed out, and don't we all need to relate to that in some capacity?" That is how I have sort of fused my connection to people, and also how I have become a writer.
I had a mentor in my late teens/early twenties, a sociologist named Philip Mabry, who was one of my professors and my adviser in school. He really kind of recognized that in me, and he introduced me to the comedy of Margaret Cho in my late teens. He said, "This is someone who has learned how to make the abject upright." The really wonderful comedians in our world are the ones who are not necessarily poking fun at everyone else, they're reaching into their own trauma and their own sadness and their own gifts, and then they're just pulling them out, and being like, "Here they are, do you see them? All right, now I want you to laugh at them."
It's inviting, it's like an invitation to be like, "Here is all of the muck and the mess of who I am, and this is why it's okay to laugh at it," as opposed to someone, you know, singling you out and directing all of their anger at you without the invitation, which we all know, you know, is something that can be true.
In my own writing of my recent past, it's a lot of reflections after the loss of my son in 2021. That was such a tremendous loss for me that I was like, "Oh, this is it, this is the end of being funny. There's no more humor left in my world, it's over." And of course, I think anyone would think about that being true for them after they went through something really significant.
But I had this sort of an aha moment one day, I think maybe six months after my loss. I was going to a drive-up, a Taco Bell, and I was ordering like five soft tacos for myself. I realized that like five soft tacos is like too many tacos for one person on a normal basis, and I panicked. This was not a funny moment. I want to just say, this was a sad time where I was like, "I'm just gonna like eat tacos and cry and not think about my life." But in that moment I like, picked up the phone and pretended that I was on the phone with someone that I wasn't. There was no one on the phone. And meanwhile, like, my child just died, I'm newly divorced, all of these things are happening, and I'm just like, "Hi honey, oh yeah, I got—I ordered you your—you want the chicken to go, right? Yeah, okay, I'll see you later."
Then I'm leaving the parking lot and I'm just like, "That's hilarious." That encounter with the deepest darkest well of my grief and the fact that I just pretended to be ordering tacos for a partner that does not exist in this moment because I was too embarrassed to let the person on the other side of the drive-through speaker know that I'm going to go home and binge eat tacos and cry in my beans—I was like, okay, I can write funny poems again, I can infuse those two things. And that became a poem in the upcoming book called "Taco Tuesday."
If I don't find a way to remedy some of those dark edges with some humor then there's like nothing left. So it took some time to be funny again, but I think that there is humor in the darkest, darkest things, and that is survival, I think, for me, and, I think, for a lot of people who write or make art of any kind.
So it sounds like for you there's an intrinsic relationship between sadness and humor. But I also am hearing something that is very important, I think, for a lot of our entrants to know, which is that part when you were talking about from an early age you realized that you had to be palatable. Of course, as a trauma survivor or anybody in any kind of minority or minoritized situation, being palatable can be a very loaded and also traumatized thing, but in the comment that you made I just feel this very poet-esque regard for the reader. And for you even at that young age the reader was already there. You realized it's not just about you and your experiences in your art.
In life we all are living through our experiences and our experience is just for us, more than anybody else. But when you take the step to write poetry or any kind of art and show it to other people, it's always including that other person. When we see a lot of these entries that are about those other positive experiences, like you know, love, or spiritual enlightenment, or seeking, or when we see those really, really serious poems, I get a sense that a lot of these poems are written to help people process their own experiences, but they're not necessarily written with that other person in mind, that other person on the end, whether it be the judge or another intended reader.
Absolutely, and I think there's a difference between your journal and the poem that you want read. My journal is very, very different than the poetry that I share on social media or I try to submit for publication. I think there's a question that you have to ask yourself between, and that's like, "Do I want this to be read or not? Do I want people to share in this experience?" And I think that's where the sort of palatability comes from, because I think even as a little kid I was like, "I want, you know, people at school to like me," right, so like my persona at school is going to be different than the introspective little kid at home who's writing in their diary right trying to be Harriet the Spy.
I don't think that we owe it to anyone to be palatable in our subjective experiences, that is entirely ours. But when we're making art to be shared, I think we have to ask ourselves, like, "How do we want to hit our reader or our observer?" And you know, contextually, that could be in a multitude of ways, and being palatable can mean many different things, but I think in a humor poetry contest it's that fusion of human subjective experience and poignancy with that objective experience of like, "Other people can observe this and relate to it and laugh at it with me."
Again, it's an invitation into this inner world that I want to share with you, not that you're walking in on and I have to explain myself. That doesn't strike chords, generally. That tends to feel like, "Oh, sorry, sorry that I walked in on that," versus "Oh my God, me too! I've also been caught in that place!"
Going back to the theme of your poetry for a second, you're a Wergle veteran, because you had this hilarious poem called "Regarding Eggplant" in 2011. I urge all the viewers to read that poem, and I'm going to link to it in the description of this video so you'll be able to read it. But I also just want to ask, like, as kind of a case study of a successful Wergle Flomp poem: Where did you get your inspiration? What was your process writing that?
Again, it came from a dark place. I had just been broken up with. I was twenty-three when I wrote that poem, so I was really young, and I was also freshly out of a job. There was just so much happening in my life that was very synonymous with being, like, a twenty-three-year-old person in the world and fending for themselves for the first time, really.
That poem didn't just sort of appear out of nowhere, it came from a lot of different things. It came from, you know, going to the grocery store and feeling like, "Okay, well, I'm, you know, I'm single, and I have no job, and I have nothing to do with myself, like, I should treat myself to something really nice," and then like looking at the produce, and like feeling more sad, being like, "I don't know how to cook, I don't know how to, like, I don't know to take care of myself, like, what am I supposed to do here?"
That sort of evolved because a friend came to visit me and he brought me eggplants from his garden, and one of the eggplants had a nose. Like, it had like, you know, the top of the eggplant, which like looked like a little hat, and it had this growth defect which looked like a nose. And I was like, "I'm never gonna to be able to cut this eggplant, I'm never gonna be able to cook it, it's just gonna like, have to rot on my counter, because I like, I've named him, and I love him, and there's no world in which I can imagine, you know burning him alive."
So it evolved from that place, dumped, jobless, eggplant, like being completely out of my mind with what it means to be a grown-up and take care of myself. It's like my coming of age. I think it happened all in that poem.
I just love the story, I love the poem, and I hope that everybody will go read it.
If you read that poem, read the book Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, because that's where I was in my life, and I never knew that book existed until I wrote that poem and people started giving it to me. It was such a perfect compliment.
We have to be wrapping up, but before we do, do you have any advice for the entrants who are now preparing poetry for the contest this year?
I think that there is something to be said about appealing to the zeitgeist and what's going on in the world. We all experience the objectivity of being a person in the world that's consumed by social media and things being pummeled at us from all angles, and so many of the poems that we get are about that. But they're not about the version of us in those moments. There are a lot of generalizations. If you just take that one step further and write about how that impacted you, or how something in your life changed, I think there's a lot of richness.
Just as an example, algorithms. A lot of people wrote very generally about algorithms, and it inspired me, reading all of these poems, to write about algorithms, but the very specific things that the internet was trying to appeal to me. So I got tons of advertisements for Bog Witch t-shirts and like, a bog witch, being like, this like lowly spinster in her garden making potions. And I'm just like, "Oh the internet knows my name!" I got all of these Fleetwood Mac advertisements. Clearly, the internet thinks that I am a spinster witch alone in my house. Like, it's not wrong, right?
I didn't see a lot of those deeply personalized poems about, like, "What like is the internet advertising to you personally," as opposed to, "I'm so tired of going online and all the algorithms." We all go through that, so what is it about your life that resonates with that experience? And why are you frustrated? Because if you go one step deeper into that swamp, we're all gonna laugh at it with you. Take one step further into the muck of your own life and find something that resonates, that is very specific to you, but something that all of us can relate to. And that is true of formal poetry, of rhyming poetry, of limericks, you know, like, we get them all, and there's room for all of it.
Viewers take note: Take one step further into the muck of your life! Well, thank you so much, Lauren. It's been an absolute pleasure to be talking with you. I'm so happy that we have all these amazing concrete pieces of advice from the reader who really, really matters—that is, the judge of the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest.
Thank you so much for having me! It's a pleasure to see you and to talk to our Werglers, because we don't get an opportunity to do that enough.
“Each Morning I Rise Like a Sleepwalker & Rot a Little More.”
By Jeff Walt
"Each Morning I Rise Like a Sleepwalker & Rot a Little More."
—Amiri Baraka
Two packs of Pall Malls while leaning
on this window sill all day
& hollerin', Choco, take me down
the Hershey Highway! instead
of looking for work.
Between Cloves & men, my dear Chocolate
Transsexual Goddess of Delight—"Best Blow Job
on Lemon Street"—thrusts her usual hula
at tourist cruising in a Humvee limousine. Prince
somewhere singing Tick, Tick Bang.
Tonight my budding career is standing here—rent's due
on this room and Mr. Manager
tacked a pink slip to the door.
So, I say it aloud: I've missed the bull's-eye in this life.
Never chased a tornado.
Not one tomb unearthed.
No Lotto blown.
I remember being saved.
There was a priest kneeling; he read prayers
from gilded pages.
Now I worship down
at Tony's liquor store
where that cleft-lipped kid
on the donation box stared
the last bit of lint
outta my conscience
for buying a pint of skunk instead.
In Group my brothers handed me
an invisible hammer & nails, told me to build
a house on the inside.
I love Chocolate.
She owns her dark alley.
She's home,
& she knows how to work it.
“That’s Not How I Remember It”: Creative Nonfiction and the Art of Dealing with Doubters
In this essay at The Review Review, creative nonfiction writer Megan Galbraith discusses the unavoidably subjective and emotional nature of memory, and the delicate balance between preserving family ties and telling your truth.
(In)Visible Memoirs Project
Editors say, "Our focus is on communities traditionally underserved by literary programming and underrepresented in contemporary literature. We recognize that the exclusion of so many voices from literary programming limits our understanding of the world in which we live and deprives us all." They are seeking workshop proposals to bring the project to more communities in the US, with a special interest in the Inland Empire and San Joaquin Valley areas of California.
[insert] boy
By Danez Smith. This debut full-length collection is a furious love song to black men, whom he embraces as lovers and mourns as brothers slain by racist violence. An award-winning slam poet, Smith is superlatively skilled at translating the rhythms of spoken word to the page, with double-entendre line breaks that snap from comedy to tragedy, or back again, in the space of a single breath. These poems are inspired in the religious sense of the word, revealing the sacred in the body's earthiest moments, and sounding a prophetic call against injustice.
[Spoiler Alert]
[Spoiler Alert] is the online book club of The American Scholar, a well-respected magazine of literary criticism and essays. "We're a forum for swapping book recommendations, meeting editors and authors, and connecting with other readers across the country, culminating in regular livestreamed discussions about our book of the month." Read the forum guidelines and submit a request to join their private Facebook group.
1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Novelist and creative writing professor Susan Straight created this book recommendation list at StoryMaps, organized by the location in America that is the novel's setting or cultural milieu. View the map to find a book for a particular place, or browse her essays about the 11 cultural regions into which the Library is sorted. "The idea for this 'library of America' was born in 2016, when the news and the elections told of a country being irrevocably divided by politics, by ideas of red and blue, by arguments over who is American and who is not. For me, those arguments ignored the vast geography of our stories and novels, the ways people search for belonging, leave home or stay, and how every state is really many places. Those arguments also ignored our common dreams, fears, challenges, hopes and everyday experiences, which unite us, regardless of where we live," she says in this May 2023 Los Angeles Times opinion piece about the project.
10 Tips for Creating Your First Children’s Picture Book
In this 2018 article from the blog of self-publishing and marketing vendor BookBaby, Michael Gallant interviews Jill Santopolo, an executive editor at Penguin Young Readers Group, about the essential elements of a successful picture book. Key advice: keep the text short and make every word count, like a haiku, but don't dumb down the narrative. The fundamentals of storytelling—a relatable character, emotional arc, and plot through-line—apply to books for all ages.
100 Common Publishing Terms
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest. In this September 2019 post on their website, he defines 100 common publishing terms such as simultaneous submissions, work for hire, log line, and much more. Useful for understanding contest guidelines and publication contracts.
13th Balloon
By Mark Bibbins. This multi-layered yet accessible book-length poem is an elegy for the author's late partner, Mark Crast, one of the many casualties of the AIDS crisis at its height in the 1980s and early 90s. From the vantage point of 2020, a middle-aged gay man looks back on the ghosts of his community and surveys a youth culture that knows of the mass devastation only as history, if at all. Brief unpunctuated lines give the poem the contemporary immediacy of a social media newsfeed, while the everyday embodiments of grief have a timeless relevance.
19th Century Character Trope Generator
Whether you're writing a real or parody 19th-century historical melodrama, or seeking some levity while studying English literature, this algorithm will make you smile, and possibly alert you to cliché tropes in your work. What happens when the Troubled Squire who is in Love with a Duke meets the Mysterious Governess with Homosexual Tendencies? Let your imagination run wild.
20.35 Africa
20.35 Africa is a resource institution and publisher for African poets, particularly younger and emerging writers across the continent. They began in 2017 with their annual electronic anthology series featuring African writers aged 20-35. Newer features on the website are the Conversations series of interviews about the role of poetry in Africa today, and the New Poets series showcasing individual writers.
20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry
Edited by Safia Elhillo and Gbenga Adesina. Published as an online PDF anthology by Brittle Paper, this diverse and emotionally affecting anthology features emerging African and African-diaspora poets aged 20-35.
2020
By Thelma T. Reyna
have you foreseen the decade 'round the corner,
looming with teeth fully bared,
partisans lined in gauntlets
with elephant memories of grievances deep,
guttural throats
growling reminders
of sick people crying in congressional halls,
of brown people dying in paradise lost
on the other side of the divide,
hoodless men with leather straps on chests,
with shields not board but military-grade,
boots of steel tramping city streets,
german cries with arms to skies,
plots to ram not once
but blocks and blocks and blocks
of protest signs
Reprinted from Reading Tea Leaves After Trump (Golden Foothills Press, 2017)
25 Animations of Great Literary Works
This article at Open Culture features links to short films animating such literary classics as an Emily Dickinson poem, the parable of Plato's Cave, and excerpts from Kafka's diaries and Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf.
25 Books by Indigenous Authors You Should Be Reading
Kaitlin Curtice is a poet and spirituality writer, and an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Citizen Band Nation. Her book Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places was published in 2017 by Paraclete Press. In this article on her blog, she recommends contemporary books of poetry, fiction, spirituality, and children's literature by indigenous authors. "If you want to break cycles of colonization and assimilation, you must take the time to learn from Indigenous experiences, through our own words." Visit her website here.
3:48am, The Real Reason Sharing a Bed with Your Baby Is Highly Unadvisable…
3:48 AM, THE REAL REASON SHARING A BED WITH YOUR BABY IS HIGHLY UNADVISABLE; or, MAMA'S LITTLE HEARTBREAKER by Jenny Sanders
Sleeping, sometimes,
Pink petal, concave curl,
Pliable, meldedcandlewax
Baby—
So that I set the illusion
She is more a part of me.
But those days are over.
She is mostly apart of me.
Often in her infant slumber, reputed for its
Sweetness and tranquility,
She bucks and claws,
Writhes with tortured neck and arch
To draw around herself a circle,
Some clear air.
Yes, even in her dreams
Our recent separation
Is, for her it seems,
Not only fact, but desirable fact.
Soft fall of lashes on softer cheeks,
Lips parted in imperceptible breath,
This ambrosial drop of crushing sweetness
Is crusting over,
Portcullis slowly closing,
An inside joke to which I am no longer privy.
Copyright 2011 by Jenny Sanders
Critique by Jendi Reiter
For this month's Critique Corner, it seemed appropriate to begin 2011 with a poem about new birth and the passage of time. Jenny Sanders of Mount Airy, Georgia sent us this poem about her newborn daughter Lizzie. She told us that she uses poetry to "tap the myriad of intense emotions" engendered by motherhood. Where prose seeks to make experience transparent and orderly, poetry "almost always taps into a knowledge that cannot be defined as sense, but that operates on some other plane of knowing."
Sanders' reflections are a good place to begin our discussion of the use of emotional ambivalence to add dramatic interest to a poem. Coming off the holiday season, we can probably all remember moments when we experienced a disconnect between how we were supposed to feel and how we actually felt. When a poem makes room for the shadow side of an event that has been whitewashed by sentimentality, not only does it freshen up an old topic, but it wins over the reader by promising the relief that truth-telling brings.
Few milestones in life are surrounded by as many high-pressure expectations, both sentimental and judgmental, as motherhood. Recalling our own helplessness as infants, we would feel safer believing that the mother's passion for her child is always only innocent, harmless, and unselfish. As Freud and the Brothers Grimm would agree, though, all intimate relationships have other baggage: sensual desire, fear of separation, fear of mortality, and anger at the beloved for making us thus vulnerable. Like the new year, the new child is a fresh start but also an unwelcome reminder that time passes, and eventually we will die and be replaced by the next generation.
Some renowned poets who have mined this taboo territory include Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds. For instance, in Olds' poem "My Son the Man", the narrator suddenly sees herself as a cast-off trunk from which her son is making a Houdini-like escape. Sexton's 1971 collection Transformations reinterprets familiar fairy tales to highlight the psychosexual tensions between parents and children.
Sanders clearly means to join this company, based on the signals she gives us in the title. "Sharing a bed with" and "heartbreaker" come from the language of romance. The concept of duality, of splitting, is also common to both phrases. Now that the child is out of her body, their perfect union is broken. A piece of the mother is missing, the literal image of a broken heart. They must share a bed because now there are two of them.
What makes this loss interesting enough to build a poem around is, again, ambivalence: both the mother's, and the reader's, uncertainty whether it is acceptable to acknowledge and grieve this loss at all. Shouldn't she want her baby to grow up and become a person? Ought we to sympathize with this character? Like the mother's sensual pleasure in her child, which Sanders conveys well through the tactile delight of the alliterative opening lines, the conflict of interest between mother and child is a truth we'd rather not look at head-on.
The baby in this poem, too, defies our wish for a simplistic greeting-card picture of infant sweetness. "She bucks and claws,/Writhes with tortured neck and arch/To draw around herself a circle,//Some clear air." Sanders effectively uses line breaks for a visual reminder of the baby's expanding personal space. From the beginning, she too is a wholly human mix of affection and aggression.
I felt the poem could be strengthened by cutting the next stanza: "Yes, even in her dreams..." Further explanation of the subtext is not necessary, and these more prosaic lines suffer by comparison with the strong images preceding them.
Critics of co-sleeping, to whom Sanders alludes in her title, sometimes fret that the parent might roll over on the baby and suffocate her. Images of devouring and crushing color the closing scene of the poem, where the baby is envisioned as an edible sweet treat. I like the sound-echo of "crushing/crusting", and the realistic detail that babies and their surroundings become encrusted with all sorts of fluids pretty quickly.
"Portcullis" is a great word, but perhaps not the most germane metaphor in this context. Nothing before it has really primed us to picture the baby as a fortress—a hard, inorganic object. When I saw the words "slowly closing", I thought of the fontanelle, the soft spot on a baby's skull that enables it to compress in the birth canal, and closes up during the first two years. I would suggest substituting "fontanelle" for "portcullis", because then you gain the idea of the skull as another boundary, without pulling the reader out into a new set of metaphors. The child's thoughts are becoming less transparent to the mother as she ages, as evinced by the last line about the private joke.
Of course, the mother has her own private joke to share someday, when her daughter begins to perceive the universal conflicts that give this poem its resonance: "Just wait till you have children of your own!"
Where could a poem like "Mama's Little Heartbreaker" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
W.B. Yeats Society Annual Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: February 1
Long-running award offers $500, web publication, and invitation to awards ceremony in NYC in April
Able Muse Write Prize
Entries must be received by February 15
New contest from California-based small press offers $500 apiece for poetry and flash fiction
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
3arabi Song
By Zeina Hashem Beck. Winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, this Lebanese poet in exile keeps her heritage alive through lyrical tributes to famous singers of the Arab world. These multi-lingual poems weave together phrases in English, French, Italian, Arabic, and the new hybrid language Arabizi, a creation of the younger generation to represent Arabic sounds in English-character text messages. These poems are hopeful elegies, political dance tunes, nostalgic manifestos.
48 Hour Books
This self-publishing company promises quick turnaround and responsive customer service. Pricing is easy to calculate on the website.
500 Letters
Straddling the line between satire and a useful marketing tool, 500 Letters is a bot that generates "artist statements" based on your genre and minimal biographical details.
6 Tips for Successful Poetry Readings
At the Submittable blog, poet John Sibley Williams gives useful advice for selecting and performing your work in public. Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize) and Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize) and the editor of the Inflectionist Review.
81Words
81Words began as a flash fiction website hosted by Adam Rubenstein and is now curated on author Christopher Fielden's writing resources blog. Submit your 81-word short stories for online publication and possible anthology inclusion.
92nd Street Y Virtual Poetry Center
Featured authors include Truman Capote, Chinua Achebe, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Lessing, and Norman Mailer.
95 Traditional Poetry Manuscript Presses Who Do Not Charge Reading Fees
Writers' resource site Authors Publish released this list in January 2023 of 95 traditional poetry presses (i.e. not self-publishing or hybrid) that have fee-free submission periods. Not all the presses are open to entries at any given time, so check their websites for updated rules.
98 Free Online Writing Courses
The website CouponChief compiled this list in 2020, with links to numerous free online mini-courses and full semester classes in business communications, creative writing, technical writing, and journalism. Sponsors include well-known universities like Yale, Wesleyan, MIT, and UC-Berkeley, as well as online workshop providers like Creative Writing Now and The Crafty Writer.
99 Designs: Book Cover Design
99 Designs connects self-published and indie authors with freelance designers to create a professional-looking book or magazine cover. Set your price (minimum $299), describe your concept, and choose from proposals by 10 or more designers.
A Basic Guide to Getting Permissions & Sample Permissions Letter
Publishing expert Jane Friedman explains the legal requirements for quoting or excerpting copyrighted material in your own published work. Topics include fair use and how to request reprint permissions.
A Bride of Narrow Escape
Lush poems, at first heavy with the weight of memory and responsibility as the author nurses her dying parents, then laden with a sweeter burden of nature's ripeness and the enjoyment of her own body. A mature and trustworthy voice. This book was published by Cloudbank Books in their Northwest Poetry Series.
A Changed Man
Part novel of ideas, part romantic comedy, this book begins with a young skinhead walking into the office of World Brotherhood Watch, a human-rights group run by a Holocaust survivor, and saying he wants to help them "save guys like me from becoming guys like me." The events that follow reveal each character to be a very human mix of vanity and genuine altruism, with the latter most often emerging in small moments away from the spotlight. The novel raises provocative questions about the tension between service to grand causes and caring for the individuals in one's personal life, though Prose could have accomplished more with this theme by introducing a true villain to raise the stakes in the conflicts between characters.
A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation
More than just a style guide, this book discusses how creative writers can use punctuation for artistic effect. Lukeman, a literary agent and author of bestselling writing manuals, explores such questions as how dashes enhance Emily Dickinson's poems, or how Melville used semicolons to convey tension in Moby-Dick. Includes writing exercises.
A Day in the War
We lurked in the shades of a wasted heritage;
We scorpions in uniform awaiting orders to act.
Heights lined the horizon like drums
Tolling the knell of another man's war.
"Just give us time," Air-command demanded;
And the razed brush blazed like symphonic scales
Of sunlight strumming waves on the Kinneret.
The skies churned black as if vomited
From the bowels of the earth.
Then the words from the wireless
Wafted through the silence
"Move in after me!"
Columns of armor and swift moving armaments
Lurched into action.
No one could boast that the going was good;
Slopes steep as they were,
And our guns probing the sky
Beyond enemy bunkers, antennae
Impotent as blind insects.
Yet when we'd surmounted ravaged slopes,
With barrels of our arms
Still shining and cold,
The plateau stretched ahead
All bleak, charred and shelled. No cohorts
Were gleaming with purple and gold,
But the Syrian lay strewn
Like a frieze out of hell.
Copyright 2006 by Mike Scheidemann
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "A Day in the War" by Mike Scheidemann, blends firsthand war reporting with literary and historic allusions to depict not only the immediate sensations of this Israeli soldier, but the tradition that he draws upon to explain to himself why he fights. Though he would like to mythologize his actions, the predominance of mechanical and insectile imagery suggests that the contemporary conflict is only a mocking imitation of more-heroic battles of yore.
The vivid opening lines take us right into a scene of darkness and conflict, hinting at a reverse evolution that has turned men into insects and civilization into decadence: "We lurked in the shades of a wasted heritage;/We scorpions in uniform awaiting orders to act." The first thing we learn to situate ourselves is that we are fighting "another man's war". This phrase suggests the soldiers' lack of personal belief in the mission. It could also be read as "another of Man's wars"—which one, it scarcely matters. As the title suggests, this could be any day, any war; the idea of human progress is a joke.
Later details, such as Lake Kinneret and the Syrians, let us know that this is an Israeli-Arab conflict, most likely the Six-Day War of 1967 when Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria. The last four lines rework a famous quote from George Gordon, Lord Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib", which itself is based on the Biblical account of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem (2 Kings 18:13-19:37).
In the original story, God sends angels to slay the Assyrian warriors. "A Day in the War", like the Bible passage, ends with the soldiers discovering that their enemy has already been killed, but the culprit is more likely a disorganized military bureaucracy that was unaware that the protagonists' campaign was redundant. By giving his poem such an anticlimactic, absurd ending, Scheidemann calls into question the ideology that would cast the Israeli soldiers as modern-day warriors for the Lord.
While this poem says something important and has a number of elegant lines, there are a couple of missing elements that might keep it out of the running in our annual War Poetry Contest. This is the hardest kind of poem to judge, one that has clear poetic merits but somehow doesn't knock me out. I would probably reread it a dozen times before marking it down as a semifinalist, or perhaps a finalist. (The next War Poetry Contest will open for entries on November 15.)
For starters, I felt it didn't take me far enough, in terms of storyline or emotional connection. We began this contest after 9/11 in hopes of finding poems that could help a modern audience make sense of the political, ethical and personal significance of war. Scheidemann's poem expertly depicts the dehumanization and pointlessness that became the dominant focus of war poetry after World War I. But then it just leaves me there, without an emotional resolution or a new understanding of what lesson to draw from such experiences. Having tracked down the literary narratives with which "A Day in the War" is in dialogue, I can appreciate its hidden complexity, but I also feel that a great poem should provoke a powerful response on a first reading, before looking at the footnotes.
I'm no fan of tacked-on last lines that explain the meaning of a poem, and I think the ending of this poem works well in terms of scansion and a powerful final image. Perhaps more development of the speaker's personality and inner conflicts, interspersed with the external action of the strike preparations, would have given me more of a stake in the outcome. When he realized the men he was preparing to kill were already dead, did he feel disappointed, ashamed, powerless, relieved, triumphant? Some mysterious mixture of the above? "A Day in the War" keeps me at arms' length from these questions.
The other element that drags on a poem like this one is that a few lines lacked rhythmic momentum, which stands out more in a poem this short. The opening lines (through "Kinneret"), and the lines from "Yet when we'd surmounted..." to the end, fall into a strongly accented, orderly-sounding march of iambic and anapestic feet, echoing the Byron poem's four-anapest lines. When this pattern was broken by the insertion of more irregular, conversational cadences, I found it jarring. The lines from "The skies turned black" to "Lurched into action" sounded prosy compared to the rapid, complex meter and sharply textured consonants of "And the razed brush blazed like symphonic scales/Of sunlight strumming waves on the Kinneret."
How much music is packed into those two lines! The open, bright sounds of "razed/blazed/waves" help me visualize the sunlight on the water, while the hum of M and N sounds in "sun/strum/Kinneret" and the alliteration of "symphonic scales/sunlight strumming" produce the drowsy lull of an afternoon by the shore.
Anapestic lines can sound quite sing-song to modern ears, especially in a poem that presents itself as free verse. I would suggest Scheidemann either transform "A Day in the War" into an overtly formal poem, or loosen up the predictable rhythm of the final six lines (the ones that most closely track Byron's version) while adding more poetic imagery and psychological depth to the middle stretch of the poem.
Where could a poem like "A Day in the War" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
The Bridport Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
One of Britain's largest awards for poetry and short fiction, offering 5,000 pounds in each category; enter by mail or online
Writers Bureau Poetry & Short Story Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30 (formerly July 31)
UK-based online writing school offers top prize of 1,000 pounds in each genre, plus several runner-up awards; online entry option new for 2006
Erskine J. Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
Award for unpublished poems from the journal Smartish Pace offers $200, print and online publication; online entries accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
A Defense of Poetry
This winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize rediscovers the glorious art of invective in the title poem, comprising several pages of (footnoted) insults such as "your brain is the Peanut of Abomination" and "suing you would be like suing a squirrel". This book is a uniquely uninhibited burst of creativity which reminds poets how much firepower we're not using.
A Dialogue Between Jendi Reiter and Bruce Wilkerson
This month, we're departing from our usual format to share some insights from one of our subscribers about stylistic choices in free verse. In the May and June critiques, I said that poems with very short lines (one or two words) often didn't work for me. I've found that beginning poets overuse them as a shortcut to making prosaic diction look poetic without sufficient attention to the cadence and meaning of the phrases. Not every word in a poem is important enough to carry a whole line by itself.
Newsletter subscriber Bruce Wilkerson felt my criticism of this technique was over-broad, and sent one of his poems along with an eloquent explanation of how he used line breaks to enhance the meaning and sound of the piece. We appreciate his allowing us to reprint the following correspondence.
Date: 7/8/2005
From: Bruce Wilkerson
To: critique@winningwriters.com
...I've been reading through your critiques and I do find them very intelligent and insightful - I've even become convinced that you are truly human. You can't know how much of a relief that is! I hope you don't mind if I say though that you make one affirmation that I have trouble fully accepting; I'm not so sure though that I agree with you concerning the "super short verse" (the May 05 critique) which certainly has the inconveniences that you mention but which does have some advantages (well I often like using it). As far as trying to sound profound, whatever the length, a "poet" - if you like the word - that wants to sound profound, generally comes across as some two-bit prophet. I hope to God I never sound profound! Please tell me if I do.
...Here's a poem I took out and tried to dust off, it has still got a little grime under the fingernails though. I know it's in a style that is very different from what you seem to like but it's the one in which I used the most one word lines. If you are interested in a few reflections about why I like them, you can go down and read after the poem - but don't say I didn't warn you.
untitled still
once in the dark
camouflaged under my cover
from dangers imagined
still
I would ring my haven
with tigers and bears
until the relief of day
let me bolt from my bed
believing all was
won
excited
to
be together with my
teddies
missing
today
so I lie here waiting
once
the clock has rung
twice
recalling those monsters
that would scare me
once
the lights went out
again
hiding
my head under my pillow
hoping they might pass
to where they roamed
once
a dream
now
they rule the world by day
and so must I
hide my face
under my brow
knowing I will be
exposed alone
to this cold morning
once
the alarm has sounded
twice
rousing me
when I only want
seconds
to rest in peace
forgotten
once more
amongst my
kind
teddies
I like using [short lines] because they interrupt the syntactic chain, and thus the phonemic one, giving the reader the choice to interpret the word as an isolated element, the notion(s), or one whose scope is dependent on the other elements in the chain of speech (sorry about the jargon). In other words, it's a nice way to underline the polysemy of a word or eventually bring to mind homophones of the same word. For example, if you add a pause after the word "once", its meaning is quite different from the word "once" when it is integrated into the melody of the phrase. Another example is the preposition "to" in a sentence, the vowel will be realized as a schwa, whereas isolated, it will become a long U sound like in the words "too", "two".
Thanks,
Bruce
********
Date: 7/8/2005
From: critique@winningwriters.com
To: Bruce Wilkerson
Dear Bruce,
Thanks for your poem and thought-provoking "defense" of the short line. You make a good case! I've taken aim at this stylistic choice lately because I see less-experienced poets relying on it too much to break up their prosy phrases into something that looks like poetry. I'm trying to provoke them to listen more closely to verbal rhythms; they may still end up with short lines, but hopefully will have put more thought into why the lines break where they do.
In your poem ("once in the dark...") the short lines generally worked for me, because the rhythm is tense and taut, fitting the subject matter. I initially questioned whether "to" deserved its own line in the first stanza. But after reading your explanation, I went back and realized that the sounds "won" and "to" in the first stanza were punning echoes of the "once" and "twice" in the next stanzas. Clever.
I was going to take a vacation from "critique corner" in July, so I wonder if we could mix things up a bit in the newsletter and reprint this exchange between you and me (plus your teddies poem of course). I liked the high-level theoretical way you defend your stylistic choices. I'd also be interested to hear about writers who have influenced you.
Best,
Jendi
********
Date: 7/9/2005
From: Bruce Wilkerson
To: critique@winningwriters.com
Thank you, I would be very honored if you reprinted it and feel free to do any editing you wish.
Excuse me if I avoid the question of influences - I can't pinpoint anything neat and precise. I would like (egotistically) to believe that it came purely from artistic necessity, some skimpily clad muse sitting by my shoulder, but more realistically I realize that we all have "a virtual library" in our head, often very badly cross-referenced like mine, from which we borrow most of what we utter or write without realizing it.
On the question of line length, I do have to agree with you that cutting up sentences like sausages doesn't make poetry, even if we could come to an agreement on what poetry really is. I find choosing the right length very difficult though; what you gain on one side you often lose on the other. So, if you don't mind, I'll add a few quick reflections and you can keep what you want. If you ever have any responses to my questions, I'd love to hear them.
I like longer, more lyrical phrases too but what I often find difficult with long lines (and with short lines for different reasons) is the division of the sentences or phrases into intonational groups, something the reader will do naturally anyway. Unfortunately these more chewable pieces don't often correspond to traditional punctuation and a change in the intonational group, or a displacement of the nucleus, can alter the message radically. How much do I want to guide this segmentation and impose one interpretation? Short lines can often be too restraining. On the other hand, if I leave it to the reader, (s)he will choose the most obvious. I don't know how well it works but I sometimes isolate a word between two lines with the hope that this will make the reader click out of automatic pilot. You'll notice that the interpretation of the word "once" has to do with the choice of intonational groups. If I had put it with line above, we would have had one thing, and with the line that followed, yet another. The problem was similar with "…a dream/now/they rule…" in which the scope of the adverbial remains ambiguous. I'm just not sure that this sort of thing would work well with longer lines and I’m not even sure it's understood here. I'll give it some more thought myself but I'd love to have other opinions too.
All the best,
Bruce
[End of excerpt]
********
Bruce's poem illustrates an effective use of frequent line breaks to create ambiguity and multiple meanings. For instance, in the first stanza, the one-word line "still" could signify different things depending on whether the reader connects it to the preceding or the following line, or sees it as a separate adjectival phrase. "From dangers imagined/still" foreshadows the later part of the poem where the speaker is still tormented by nighttime fears, whereas "still/I would ring my haven" treats the word as equivalent to "nonetheless" (despite the camouflage, he also needed the teddies to protect him). "Still" by itself describes the child lying motionless. A similar effect takes place in the lines "they rule the world by day/and so must I/hide my face", where the first two lines set up an assertion of adult mastery that is exposed as make-believe in the third line.
During the process of writing, you may be someone who chooses images and techniques in an intuitive, subconscious way, or someone more analytical. I'm not suggesting that every word choice should be the subject of conscious internal debate. But as an exercise, during either the writing or the revision stage of a poem, try to explain to an imaginary other person why you chose a particular method of expressing yourself. Why was the sunset "red as a rose" and not "red as a tomato"? Why was your love poem a sonnet and not a limerick?
Look back over a selection of your poems. Are there words, topics or sound patterns that you return to as a matter of habit? Write a piece that deliberately shuns these familiar tools. Whether or not you like the result, you will have increased your awareness of your own thought processes as a writer, which will help you develop more control over your material.
This dialogue appeared in the July 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
A Field Guide to Falling
By em jollie. This poetry collection is like a stained-glass cathedral window: even in scenes of suffering, the glorious colors give joy and uplift. Much of the book processes the aftermath of breaking up with a beloved woman, though at the end, the narrator seems to find a new beginning with another partner and a greater sense of herself as complete and sufficient. But this therapeutic summary can't do justice to the mystical meaning of her journey. The speaker bravely walks up to the edge of everything we consider permanent, looks into the clouds swirling above the bottomless gulf, and finds a way to praise their ever-changing shapes. These poems imply that the value of falling--in love, out of love, out of Eden into a world of loss--is in how it challenges us to keep our hearts open, to say Yes despite it all.
A Friend in Need
By Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Liuling is pottering around naked because he lives between heaven and earth. He feels his house suffices in bundling him up. Da-Ren is in the house too, reshelving The Homeric Hymns under Depth Psychology. He likes the way verse translations help him hum about things he would never hum about like subway tokens and bad directions. Old journals end up in the in-tray and the dictionaries? They now line up under Creative Nonfiction. Liuling hasn't taken a bath in a long time because he perspires into no shirts that put his own dirt back on himself. "They must go back a long way," the archivist thinks to himself, reading a Thank You card that was never sent out. There are food coupons and utility bills and warranty cards strewn across the sideboard. The dishwasher is plugged into the kitchen tap where water flows in and siphons out. The computer monitor is covered with stickers like a screensaver that never blinks. "I made that myself," Liuling gesticulates towards the wind chime of cowbells, seashells and paper cranes. In his wine, Liuling sees the entire world for what it is and then tries to drink the memory.
A Gatekeeper’s Vigil
By Helen Leslie Sokolsky
I wander through carpets of heather and primrose
leaving behind a discordant arena
my salve is found locked in this garden
where a single flower can restore the soul
no strife present in this cloister of tranquility
as a soft breeze shakes marigold petals
forming a wreath of gold around my ankles.
Standing in a meadow of solitudes
one can absorb the peacefulness of earth
watch the landscape begin to soften
the flowers standing monastic in parallel rows
their stems posed as soothsayers, pensive, pondering.
I inhale the fragrance of this colorful mosaic
extend my palms to embrace their beauty
ready to move into a different space
gatekeeper to those forgotten fields
where clusters of white blossom into an Eden
a shepherd's purse.
From that purse pockets of solace will be gathered
and when there are enough
all the branches with an Easter promise
will be carried to the world outside.
A Gift of Ghazals
The ghazal is a poetic form from the Arabian Peninsula popularized in the modern West by the late Agha Shahid Ali. This essay shares Ali's insights into this challenging, rewarding structure, whose literal meaning is "flirtation".
A Given Grace: An Anthology of Christian Poems
This e-anthology edited by Singaporean poets Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé and Eric Tinsay Valles was launched to commemorate the Philippine quincentennial and Singapore bicentennial of Catholicism in 2021. Free to read online, this collection's 100 contributors from around the world include well-known authors such as Diane Glancy, G.C. Waldrep, and Paul Mariani.
A Guide to Verse Forms
Bob Newman has found exquisite forms to frame your words. Bone up on Chant Royal, Domino Rhyme, Rhopalics and Rubaiyat. An idiosyncratic links page presents treasures like Arnaut & Karkur's ultimate on-line prosody resource, a great resource to learn about important verse forms.
A Hundred Falling Veils
A Hundred Falling Veils is the poem-a-day blog of Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Her poetry collections include Naked for Tea (finalist in the Able Muse Book Award), Even Now, The Less I Hold, The Miracle Already Happening: Everyday Life with Rumi, Intimate Landscape, and Holding Three Things at Once (Colorado Book Award finalist). Visit her Word Woman site for information on her writing workshops and speaking engagements.
A Knot of Worms
These quiet poems are charged with a sacred attention to healing the wounds sustained by our bodies and ecosystem. In the aftermath of war or illness, the human spirit finds wholeness by recovering our common bond with whales, dragonflies, and even worms. This chapbook was published in the New Women's Voices series from Finishing Line Press.
A Late Memorial
By Geoffrey Heptonstall
The words, already written,
are now in the process of being
opened and heard at random,
to write with a momentum
of their own choosing.
And so begins an impossible hour
imbibed with passion—
the fear of not knowing
as others say they have known
how it will end when finally...
Those dreams were sung by everyone
drinking metaphor as spoken
by several personae, each with his name.
Later in the early hours he confesses
the ice complements a bourbon dawn,
smiling at the thought of everything
Waking to hear the well-remembered,
let us whisper the proper tea values
of English princes Shakespeared
by a Harvard man
so near the music of devoured dreams.
Knowing those neighbours,
they had a common source.
Approaching them, he died.
A Letter to Grandpa
By Jackie Smith
Dear Grandpa,
You must know this.
I remember it all.
Paula was your favorite
But you taught us both to whittle
With your pocket knife.
"Don't tell Grandma," you warned.
We sharpened sticks
Bled milkweed sap onto the points
Poison darts for a game we never played.
You walked us to the drug store
Sat us at the counter with Cherry Cokes
While you went next door for a beer.
"No need to tell Grandma."
Our little secret.
Your breath smelled like beer
The night you held me on your lap.
We picked tomatoes with you
The pungent scent burning our nostrils
Hairy vines brushing our thighs
Leaving red welts like scars
Warm fruit, juice running down chin
Crimson, acid tears.
After fourth grade
I never wanted to see you again.
That last time.
You knelt before me crying
Begging forgiveness.
Writing this, you gone extinct
Me exhausted from cursing you
Is as unsettling as the kiss you
Placed on my forehead
Yet I say, "Dear Grandpa"
Because that is what good girls say.
And I am always a good girl.
A Life
By Victoria Leigh Bennett
He was a man
Rich in tea bags
And paper napkins.
His days were bounded
By thoughts of Caesar
And Agamemnon
But he was none of them.
Most of his friends
Thought he must at one time
Have been British,
For the accent was hard to place.
And when the little moustache quivered
At some frustration
With a daily happenstance,
In secret, they found it funny,
Though they didn't want to hurt him,
Oh no, never to hurt him.
He liked some alcohol in moderation,
Going to the local bar to have it
And always saluting the waitress politely,
Though he longed for a male presence
To be at his elbow, solicitous.
In token of her womanhood,
He always used the cardboard coaster
She brought him under his pint,
As if it had been her house and he her guest,
Convinced that she found him
More gallant that way.
He took his landlady's grim lace curtains
Down to be washed one day
When she had left them up just too long;
One day in winter, when the weather
Was damp and drear,
And he got soaked through, and his feet wet.
Then he sneezed once and was promptly ill,
As he would have expected.
When he signed into the hospital
The doctor wrote "chest complaint";
How quaint! As if he belonged
To another, untechnical era indeed.
And when he inexplicably sickened and died
A few days later,
"No family" was written on his card at the morgue,
Though a few well-meaning acquaintances
Held a brief and noncommittal
Commitment service
Over his ashes.
His little bird, as if she had been
A secret mistress no one knew about
Or had forgotten in the dull excitement,
Chirped with mysterious forebodings
For three days more
And then gave out from lack of water;
She only knew that she had nothing to drink,
Couldn't get out,
And there was nothing to be done about it.
When the ones appointed
Went to clear out,
They found her, and
"What a pretty pet!
How nice it would have been
For the children to take her!" they said.
She, whose little claws had stiffened
Into predatory shapes,
So gentle as she was.
Gentle, as he had been gentle,
And sometimes annoyed without conviction
At the bounds of her cage,
Just as he with his life.
No greater conqueror than he of her,
She his only claimed territory,
The only living thing he even lightly controlled.
His friends, shrugging in amusement
At the cabinet of tea and coffee supplies,
The paper napkins and the cans and jars
And boxes of tea and coffee,
Ended by dividing them up,
Each grateful, but not unduly,
For his or her share,
"To remember him by,"
Not one of them wondering
How long they might remember him
When the stuff was gone.
The landlady, satisfied that the tenant
Had kept the premises clean
Contented herself with a mere sweep
And a few swipes
With a lemon polish rag,
Putting her notices up in the paper again.
A Limited Depth of Field
By Diane Elayne Dees
My long-term memory is a collage
of shadows and dimly visible colored lights.
Atmosphere and emotion occupy
most of the space, but there is clarity
in random details.
We are sitting in your living room
in the house near the levee,
listening to saxophone music
oozing out of your ancient German speakers.
It is the cleanest, most resonant sound
I have ever heard.
We are at a dinner party
at the Columns Hotel,
and a rare New Orleans ice storm hits.
A few brave souls drive home,
but the rest of us rent a room,
stay up all night, and order endless drinks
from a woman we insist on calling Babette.
We are in the office of the weekly newspaper,
exchanging gossip, or at Tipitina's,
chatting with James Booker,
or we are at an art show
where all of the artists are our friends.
I long to remember more details,
but must be content with savoring
the ones I recall, and with knowing
that so many of my days were richer
because you were there.
A Literary Agent’s Guide to Publishing Terms Authors Should Know
Literary agent Mark Gottlieb currently works at Publishers Marketplace's #1-ranked literary agency, Trident Media Group. In this article from The Write Life, he explains seven essential publishing-industry and contract terms.
a moment
By Patricia Blanco
as I lie like a frayed baby
you balance the abstract of your bones
with one eye at my stone hand
the other sweeping the riddle of dust
dodging dog bites to his toes
our son jumps like a crimson god
gathering the cats' narrow hisses
behind shadows unsettled
a suspended tale in time
pressing each breath
neither forward nor behind
there seems to be no more else
to ease the moment
not one moment left
to meet your eyes again, yet
you take my hand
heavy and unloading
and make a moment
inescapable from flowering
A Place to Dream
By Shobana Gomes
I found a place to dream,
It was a long time ago,
In an illusory setting, masking the clouds,
Where trees were leafless,
As they had fallen on the ground.
I found a bridge to another realm,
It brought me to a never-ending path to freedom,
Where no one could hurt me,
Or torture my kindred soul,
Where I met dreamers like me in quietude.
We talked and we laughed,
We shared and we loved,
We were in a secluded spot away from the prying multitude.
Have you heard of loneliness amongst a million?
Amongst a million-distracting vision,
A stilled mind can find the solitude of peacefulness,
And there I reside,
Most of my life in seclusion.
I found a place where my heart resides in stillness,
It is a quiet place among the trees leafless,
Where the surroundings are deep in mysticism,
For dreamers.
There is love, no hurt,
There is joy, no sadness,
There awaits someone for someone.
A Quiet Courage
A Quiet Courage is a journal of microfiction and poetry in 100 words or fewer. Submissions are also accepted in Spanish with exact English translations. Contributors have included James Penha, Adrian S. Potter, and Patrick Williams.
