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Smoke and Mold
Founded by Callum Angus (author of the story collection A Natural History of Transition), Smoke and Mold is a literary journal publishing transgender and Two-Spirit writers on themes of nature, the environment, and the climate crisis.
So You Wanna Write a Black Person
In this blog post from Queeromance Ink, a site for promoting LGBTQ fiction, romance and erotica author Sharita Lira gives advice on writing non-stereotypical African-American characters, from her own experience and that of the romance readers and writers she polled.
So You Want to Talk About Race
By Ijeoma Oluo. This manual on contemporary race relations by an up-and-coming black woman journalist should be required reading in high schools and colleges, and is also invaluable for writers to recognize prejudiced tropes in their characters and plots. Using personal anecdotes and examples from everyday life, Oluo liberates essential concepts like privilege, structural racism, and intersectionality from the academic jargon and toxic call-out culture where conversations about racism often get stuck. She neither condescends to, nor coddles the reader, showing vulnerability with stories about her family's experiences with poverty and racism, while maintaining strength and clarity in her demands for justice. Reading this book will make you feel like you've made a new friend who respects you enough to give you constructive criticism.
Social Media Hashtags for Book Authors
Web Design Relief is a site with articles on social media marketing, site design, and building your author platform online. This article from 2017 suggests 55 popular writing-related hashtags that can boost your profile on social media and give you entry into useful conversations and communities. The article includes examples of how to use them effectively.
Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators
The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators is one of the largest existing organizations for writers and illustrators. It is the only professional organization specifically for those individuals writing and illustrating for children and young adults in the fields of children’s literature, magazines, film, television, and multimedia. SCBWI offers advocacy, networking, and grants for members of the children's publishing community.
Solace at the P.O.
By Sandy Longley
So, it's my turn and I place an envelope
on the counter. The clerk asks:
"Does this package contain any hazardous liquid?"
Only a thousand tears, I reply.
"Is there anything flammable or breakable?"
Just my heart, I say.
"Would you like this sent express mail
for an additional $7.50?"
Actually, I'd prefer a slow delivery,
maybe in a canvas saddlebag, on a
dappled mare, rambling through mountains,
through valleys lush and deep, pausing
for long drinks in stony creeks.
"How about insurance?"
We both know there's no insurance,
no deductible, for matters like this;
I know what I have given,
what I have received.
He glances at the customer line lengthening—
impatience spreading like a virus.
I want him to close his window and ask me
to meet him out back. He'll be wearing cowboy
boots and smell like fresh cut locust burl.
He'll drape his tattooed arm (wild boar)
around me, offer a cigarette and say
"A dog walks into a bar..."
SOLRAD
A publication of Fieldmouse Press in California, SOLRAD is a nonprofit online literary magazine dedicated to the comics arts. SOLRAD publishes comics criticism, original comics, essays, interviews, and features new, underrepresented, and otherwise marginalized creative voices, in addition to the work of well-established cartoonists, critics, journalists, and authors.
Somewhere in Time
These amusing columns from Vulture.com music critic Dave Holmes are useful for writers researching popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s. They're also a humbling reminder of how quickly our favorite media seems dated. Trend-chasers beware.
Sonatina
This award-winning Israeli poet's new collection pairs themes of high art and nature's simple beauty. By turns political, pastoral and erotic, Simon uses musical metaphors to evoke compassion and nostalgia for his homeland and its people.
Songs and Metaphors
For Modupe
I know
There are tunes
My soul should hum
To you, but my throat
Is too sore to attempt them.
I know
There are words
My heart should say
To you, but my mouth
Is too dumb to let her.
I know
My love
You don't love me
But in you
Am too lost to turn back.
Yes
I know
Oh sable homeland
We practice democracy
But my heart
Is too hurt to believe it.
I know
My love
There are spots
My lips should touch
You, but my eyes
Are too blind to see them.
So I say
Oh poor soul sing
Sing of love
To warring homeland
Love too soft to touch
Love much quieter than a burial rite
Love that struck me dumb like thunderstorm
Love that punished my father's purse
But made us one
Love that we lack in Africa!
Open
Pray hungry mouth
Speak of love
Love that weaved webs to steal my sight
A woman too mighty for words to try
Love the silent sky of our earth
Once obsessed
With light like a palace court!
Ah!
Love the thunderous voice of our ancestors!
That blind Africa may regain her sight.
My love
Tell me
How it came to be
That we
To a fierce duet, tempt
The friendly spirits of the gods
By slaughtering ourselves.
Beware!
I say
Recoil from this draw with Liberty.
A portion poured out
To the gods
Isn't for us—poor mortals to sup
Yes
I know I hear
The break of day approaching
Though silently
A voice
Drowned in the chorus
Of tonight's wars
Hush,
Be calm
The sun is returning to her court!
The dews soon
Should descend upon
The slumbering field
Take my hand
Love
It is a sign of daybreak!
Copyright 2009 by Akpoteheri Godfrey Amromare
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Nigerian poet Akpoteheri Godfrey Amromare returns to these pages with "Songs and Metaphors", a stirring combination of the romantic lyric and the war poem. Read his August 2008 critique poem, "Whisper Without Words", here.
"Songs and Metaphors" reminded me of Wilfred Owen's famous World War I poem "Greater Love". Both poems interweave tenderness, tragedy, and prophetic hope, refusing to let the personal remain merely personal against a backdrop of large-scale atrocities, yet valuing that one-on-one intimacy as a possible cure for the desensitized attitudes that perpetuate violence.
The first three stanzas of Amromare's poem lead us to think that it is a traditional love poem. I welcomed the few touches of originality: "tunes/My soul should hum/To you" (rather than the expected "sing") and the personification of the heart as "her" instead of "it" in the second stanza, which gives the interaction a more protective, affectionate tone. But then, in the fourth stanza, an epic lament—"Oh sable homeland"—breaks into the potential narcissism of the lyric. Sentiments that could verge on banality are transfigured by their connection to relationships beyond the two lovers, such that the narrator's personal heartbreak does not distract him from his community's suffering but rather provides a means to empathize with and critique it.
Throughout the Bible, there is the recurring theme of the individual whose pains and triumphs are representative of his entire nation, for good or ill. I'm thinking particularly of the messianic "suffering servant" prophecies in the book of Isaiah, and St. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 15:22, "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ will all be made alive." In Amromare's poem, the fate of Africa seems similarly intertwined with the fate of his narrator. The collective wound has left him personally scarred. Like the scorched earth of a conquered village, he feels too damaged to produce the fruits of love. Yet if he can heal, if he can find stillness and tenderness amid the clamor of war, could that be the first green shoot that brings the "slumbering field" back to life?
So I say
Oh poor soul sing
Sing of love
To warring homeland
Love too soft to touch
Love much quieter than a burial rite
Normally I tell poets to be sparing with their exclamation points, but the ones that proliferate in the second half of this poem seem as essential as the crescendo at the end of a symphony, lifting us with the narrator to ever more sublime extremes of joy and grief. Perhaps this technique works because the poem starts out in a restrained, even numb, mood. When passion finally breaks through, we rejoice with the narrator that "The sun is returning to her court!"
I would change a few lines of this poem to make them clearer and correct some word usage. "Love that struck me dumb like thunderstorm" should be either "a thunderstorm" or "thunderstorms". To keep the characteristic rhythm of Amromare's voice, which is tight and assured throughout, I might opt for the plural, though the singular better captures the suddenness of the event.
In the lines "Love that weaved webs to steal my sight/A woman too mighty for words to try", the verb "weaved" should be "wove". I wasn't sure of the meaning of the next line. The woman is probably the beloved to whom the poem is addressed, but what are the "words trying" to do? He seems to be saying that his beloved is beyond words, in a good way. However, "steal my sight" has negative connotations—is his love a delusion? That would be contrary to the positive role that love plays everywhere else in the poem.
Further down, when he asks "How it came to be/That we/To a fierce duet, tempt/The friendly spirits of the gods", I feel like there is a missing verb after "we". It might be smoother to replace "To" with "In", since one doesn't generally speak of tempting someone to a duet, whereas one could conceive of the dance of seduction as a duet. Finally, in the lines "A portion poured out/To the gods/Isn't for us—poor mortals to sup", I would replace the dash with a line break, because I like the pause there but the dash seems out of place in the sentence structure.
These awkward spots aside, I love this poem's prophetic voice and the earthiness of its imagery. Its old-fashioned flavor might not appeal to some of the academic literary journals but it could do well in contests with a more populist aesthetic. Amromare is a poet to watch.
Where could a poem like "Songs and Metaphors" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Yeovil Literary Prizes
Entries must be received by May 31
British cultural center offers prizes up to 1,000 pounds for unpublished poems, stories and novel excerpts by authors aged 18+; online entries accepted
Keats-Shelley Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
British contest offers 5,000 pounds in total prizes for poetry on a Romantic theme (changes annually) and essays on any topic relating to Byron, Keats, or the Shelleys (Percy and Mary)
Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: July 1
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation offers prizes of $1,000 in adult category and $200 in youth categories for poems exploring positive visions of peace and the human spirit; 30 lines maximum
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2009 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Sonnet Central
An extensive archive of English-language sonnets with a discussion forum where poets can post their own work. Includes a selection of World War I poems by Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and other contemporaries.
Sonnets from Aesop
Witty sonnets by an award-winning poet retell 100 fables from Aesop, including many lesser-known tales worth rediscovering. Lively watercolor illustrations for each tale are sure to delight both adults and children. A great read-aloud book. Sonnets from Aesop received an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) as one of the ten "Outstanding Books of the Year" published by an independent press in 2005. Acclaimed formalist Annie Finch says, "What more could Aesop have wished than to address the 21st century in these dry, whimsical sonnets complemented by a series of soft, edgy watercolors. This beautifully produced book is a rare treat."
Soot
Plain-spoken and passionate narrative poetry in the tradition of Philip Levine seeks out moments of tenderness and joy amid the grit and grind of mass society. Co-winner of the 2009 Keystone Chapbook Prize from Seven Kitchens Press.
South of Presidio
From Presidio south, the land is like burnt bread.
The Chichimec's scavenged here, naked, mud-caked, moon-crazed;
Voluptuaries of the blood, ancestors of the Aztecs.
If you see a stovepipe cactus, it's a crucifix, nails and all.
By some law of rot, all weather has stopped;
It's hot, but, it's not—it's dead temperature.
It's got no color—that's what is not—no color at all.
Space, sky, nauseates the eye. The hue of elephant.
You're inside a boundless canvas tent, riding on canvas cement.
And if you break down, thousands of miles from the next town,
And suns and moons fade in and out beyond your count,
You won't die—never! Won't age. Here you remain the same—forever.
Firing across
The abyss
Between
The synapses
The neural messenger
Crackling silently
Through the branches
Of the nerve tree
Arrives
And speaks to the receptor
Soundlessly.
From where does the message come?
What is the message's origin?
What could the message be?
Spoken to the deep ear soundlessly?
And what if
The messenger slows
Stumbles and trips
Into the abyss
And the message doesn't arrive?
Could we survive—south of Presidio?
As I drive, the only thing I can think to do is whistle:
A fountain of melody
Sparkling and crystalline
Flying like glistening water
In arches of baroquean
Architecture
Yet fresh with the freedom
Of a jazz improvisation—
Charley, Antonio, Diz, Johann Sebastian...
Music is
The message
Of what
The message
Is!
South of Presidio
I pull the pick-up over,
Cut the motor,
Get down,
And all around is
Absoluteness
A wall-less
Invisible
Cathedral
Copyright 2005 by Ron Wertheim
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "South of Presidio", impressed me with its gripping depiction of the harsh yet sublime landscape of the desert Southwest. (Based on the references to the Aztecs and Chichimecs, I'm guessing that the author is referring to Presidio, Texas, a small town near the Mexican border.) Though the poem loses focus after the first four stanzas, the strong opening convinced me that the author has the talent to make this piece even better.
Poems that try to capture the spirit of a place are most effective when they make the place the central character. The author must find a delicate balance between too much and too little personal involvement in the story. Too much, and the poem becomes about the speaker's feelings about the place, not the place itself; the narrator acts as a barrier to the reader's direct experience of the location. Too little, and the poem falls apart into a collection of impersonal snapshots that exert no emotional pull on the reader.
The 20th-century poet Richard Hugo was a master of the poetry of place. He excelled at choosing the right details to reveal the souls of forgotten towns. Writers interested in exploring this genre should check out his work, as well as Philip Levine, a notable American bard of working-class people and settings.
In the first four stanzas of "South of Presidio", Wertheim's confrontational imagery draws the reader into the scene by implicitly challenging us to survive in the brutal environment he describes. The first line establishes the land as the main subject. The humans who passed through here, "naked, mud-caked, moon-crazed;/Voluptuaries of the blood," were only a moment in the history of the eternal desert, despite the terrible intensity of their animal lives.
The desert itself is the antithesis of life, where time is suspended and consciousness blurs for lack of any object to fix its attention upon. "Space, sky, nauseates the eye." This unnatural state calls forth a violent reaction from the living things that try to assert themselves against this void: "If you see a stovepipe cactus, it's a crucifix, nails and all." By contrast, those who "break down" and succumb to the desert's elemental power gain a mummified sort of immortality: "You won't die—never! Won't age. Here you remain the same—forever."
These four stanzas successfully capture the essentials of the landscape, using its distinctive physical features not only to make the scene recognizable but to illuminate the powerful emotions that the desert inspires in us. The long lines are well-paced and broken up by internal rhymes, particularly in the third and fourth stanzas. I would have been happier if the poem had ended with a fifth stanza similar to those four in style and tone, perhaps introducing a new feature of the landscape (birds, plants?) that brings in a different kind of energy or a tiny, fragile exception to the oppressive sameness.
Instead, the style and focus of the poem abruptly change, presenting a string of short lines that take place within the narrator's consciousness. For me, the second half of this poem lacked the originality and dramatic interest of the first part. The speaker's introspection did not add to my appreciation of the landscape, and the more simplistic style was a disappointment after the rich imagery and superior craftsmanship of the preceding stanzas. In the second half, the speaker is telling me how he feels about the music that he hears in his head. But in the first half, I heard the music myself—jagged, strange and compelling, like Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"—in the dance of the desert and its inhabitants.
I'm not a fan of the super-short line, popularized by poets like William Carlos Williams and Charles Bukowski. In the hands of less-experienced writers (and even in the work of these canonical authors), the technique can be exploited to make weak phrases sound more profound than they are. "Music is/The message/Of what/The message/Is!" Delivered with fortune-cookie solemnity, artificially intensified with an exclamation point, this pronouncement actually says very little, and says it without precision.
In writing the conclusion of this piece, Wertheim correctly intuited that the poem needed a change of emotional state to turn a mere description into a true narrative. The second half tries to move the poem toward a hopeful resolution, suggesting how humans can come to terms with the infinity of the desert. Our capacity to articulate and appreciate the transcendent, as manifested in music, helps us comprehend and even revere a natural phenomenon that is greater than ourselves. "Absoluteness/A wall-less/Invisible/Cathedral." Here, the short lines are more effective, letting us hear each word resonate in the slowness and spaciousness of the desert.
Altering the style can be a daring choice to highlight a change of subject and mood. However, in this poem, the shift feels jarring because there is no evident connection between the two halves of the poem until the line "Could we survive—south of Presidio?"
The imagery of the second section is also unrelated to the desert environment that the author so vividly created in the first four stanzas. The nerve tree, the abyss and the messenger are vaporous metaphorical constructs that pale in comparison to the reality of burnt, blood-soaked land and crucified cactus. The crystalline baroque fountain belongs to an entirely different time and place, as well as a more sentimental poetic tradition. Planted amid the desert's tumbleweeds and cow skulls, such a fountain would look more absurd than inspiring. The effect is of a jumble of inspirational images whose lack of connection to the original, vividly imagined setting makes them ineffective to provide narrative closure.
I've been blunt about my problems with the second half of this poem, because I love the first part so much that I want to liberate it from self-consciously poetic musings that it doesn't need. I would delete the lines from "Firing across" till "And all around is," and replace them with one or two stanzas in the same style as the first four, ending with "Absoluteness/A wall-less/Invisible/ Cathedral." Those last words do recover some of the power of the opening, and provide the key to the poem's dilemma: how we can learn to live with the desert's alien grandeur by letting reverence drive out terror.
Where could a revised version of this poem be submitted? These upcoming contests came to mind:
The MacGuffin Poet Hunt
Postmark Deadline: June 15
https://www.schoolcraft.edu/macguffin/poet-hunt-contest/
$500 and publication in this well-regarded literary magazine
Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: June 15
http://www.bitteroleander.com/contest.html
$1,000 and publication in The Bitter Oleander; editors are seeking "serious work that allows the language of your imagination to reveal in you a new perception of your life"
Guy Owen Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 15
http://www.southernpoetryreview.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4&Itemid=12
$1,000 and publication in Southern Poetry Review; well-established journal welcomes image-rich narrative poetry
Erskine J. Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 1
https://smartishpace.com/poetry-prizes/
$200 and publication in Smartish Pace; atmospheric narrative free verse predominates among the winning poems
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2005 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter.
Southern California Review
Send 1-3 unpublished poems or one story or essay, maximum 8,000 words. Editors say, "We do consider genre work (horror, mystery, romance, and sci-fi) if it transcends the boundaries of the genre." They also occasionally publish one-act or ten-page plays, scenes, and monologues, and scenes from screenplays.
Speak Up: Responding to Everyday Bigotry
The Southern Poverty Law Center has published this free online guide with suggested scripts for compassionate, appropriate conversations to interrupt prejudice and bullying in everyday social settings. Topics include becoming aware of our own biases, responding to prejudiced comments in the workplace or family gatherings, and ways to fight structural inequalities like racial profiling and discriminatory corporate policies. For writers, this guide will also be useful for correcting stereotypes in our own work, and writing dialogue for characters who are dealing with these issues.
Speaking of Marvels
Edited by award-winning poet William Woolfitt, Speaking of Marvels is a blog that features interviews with authors of chapbooks, novellas, singles, and other shorter forms. Past interviewees have included Allison Joseph, Karen An-hwei Lee, Rajiv Mohabir, Carl Phillips, Cecilia Woloch, and many other notables.
Speed (Sean)
by Gil Fagiani
When a three-day bender
costs me my bank clerk's job,
my mother makes the sign of the cross
and calls me Good-Time Charlie.
I'm her last-born and she dotes on me,
so I laugh, wave her words away
tell her not to worry
I'll lay off the lush
and find another nine-to-five.
But work's a grind.
I'm into fun, high times
and along with Nicky De Vito,
start messing with crystal meth.
Our veins hum like high-voltage wires
moonlight melts into sunshine,
motion becomes our devotion.
At home I clean the upstairs crapper
twenty times,
the bowl blazing
the pine soap and ammonia scalding my lungs.
My mother says enough already
and swats me with a toilet brush
after I scrub out the grout between the floor tile.
At his house, Nicky sits by a basement workbench
polishing a new pair of shoes
until he wears through the soles,
breaks off heels,
hiding the ruined footwear from his father,
who dishes out bare-knuckled discipline.
Once at Nicky's place,
we mainline two hype sticks of meth,
guzzle all the guinea booze in the liquor cabinet:
Strega, Compari, Frangelico, Anisette, Grappa.
Nicky flips on the new Motorola TV
complains about snowy reception
and begins taking the TV apart,
swearing he can fix and reassemble it
before his folks return home.
We spread all the screws, springs,
wires, tubes, and knobs across the carpet floor,
the first thing his parents see
when they open the front door.
Bricklayer by profession,
his father can haul a hod of cement
like it's a foam cushion.
He flattens Nicky with one blow,
knocking over a lamp,
killing the light.
I rush the front door
weave between cars
until I reach my house,
my ticker feeling like it's going
to tear through my rib cage,
my mother throwing holy water on me
as I run up the stairs.
Spider in a Tree
Set in Western Massachusetts in the 18th century, during the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening, this luminous novel re-creates the domestic life and spiritual development of the theologian Jonathan Edwards. Stinson allows the complexity of the Puritan worldview to speak for itself, setting Edwards's mystical delight in nature and his deep compassion alongside his severe views of God's judgment and his defense of slave-owning.
Spillway
Submissions of poetry, interviews, and articles should be made online only.
Spine Magazine
Spine is an online journal profiling contemporary authors, illustrators, and book designers. In-depth pieces on great cover designs will be useful to self-published authors in packaging their own work.
Spinning Silver
By Naomi Novik. This fantasy novel about the braided destinies of three resourceful young women draws on elements of Eastern European fairy tales to create a legend all its own. In a twist on the story of Rumpelstiltskin, a Jewish moneylender's daughter in an alternate-history 19th-century Lithuanian village is kidnapped by the king of the Staryk, sinister ice fairies who want her to turn their enchanted silver into gold. Meanwhile, her peasant housekeeper finds heroism thrust upon her as she strives to protect her young brothers from their abusive father. Their adventures intersect with a reluctant tsarina trying to save her people from the fae's perpetual winter spell. Multiple narrative viewpoints weave a complex tapestry of conflicting loyalties that are ingeniously resolved. Though the book ends, as a good fairy tale should, with some romantic happy-ever-after's, the primary narrative thread is how the three girls grow into their unchosen obligations and become brave leaders.
Spirit Captive
By Helen Bar-Lev
This is a city that does not let me go;
it accosts me in its alleyways,
nails me to its crossroads,
fixes me to its doorposts
Humanity pours through its gates
tainted honey and soured milk,
poets and priests, politicians and heretics,
kippah and kefiyah
it sings in harps and sirens and muezzins,
in the chanting of its many religions,
the holy now polluted, at battle with itself
Every street and corner
is inscribed in my genetic memory,
its stones are engraved in the shape of my face,
chiseled into my bones,
glow golden as clouds turn red at sunset
and a huge moon illuminates its night
I have lived here forever, a captive from the past,
since King David through Romans, Crusaders, Mamelukes,
I am buried in the tombs of prophets and messiahs,
in the rhetoric of their memories, sacred and blasphemed,
now corrupted by greed, zealots and bigotry
Yet each time I return I tumble back into a history
that has forfeited its right to claim me,
and emerge into a present not worthy of those ancient memories
How I long for the peace of the nomad,
unattached, not attracted to any land,
whose home is the world
but I cannot escape the magnetism of these mountains
where my blood flows best,
familiar forever, so compelling so repelling
I must obliterate Jerusalem from my chromosomes,
sever the silver cord that connects us,
to negate the forces drawing me here eon after eon,
to correct some flaw in my destiny
that causes my soul to resonate to its elevation,
its light, its sunsets, its stones and moon
until I am able to resist this repetition of fate,
escape the multiplicity of beliefs that stimulate and stifle
so that I may continue without the burden of its presence
invading my dreams
Thus I entreat as I hover over synagogues and mosques,
churches, museums, schools,
markets, over this city that flows through my veins
and into the soil in which I am embedded,
and from which I recoil
I need to be free, for Jerusalem to release me,
so I may replant myself in other places,
to find the peace that has never existed here,
but my roots...
What shall I do with my roots?
Spoonie Magazine
Spoonie Magazine was a weekly webzine that published creative writing and artwork by authors with physical or mental disabilities, neurodivergence, or chronic illness. There was also an annual print edition, Spoonie Journal.
Sport Literate
Personal essays, travelogues, first-person journalism, interviews, and humor are welcome. No fiction. See website for their annual contest.
Sporting Poems by Carol Ann Duffy and Others
In this July 2010 feature from The Guardian newspaper, UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has collected sports poems from such well-known authors as Billy Collins, Wendy Cope, Lavinia Greenlaw, and Paul Muldoon.
Spotify “Poetry: In Their Own Voices” Playlist
Created by the music streaming service Spotify for Women's History Month, this playlist features recordings of famous poets such as Marianne Moore, Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks reading their own work. You will need a free or paid subscription to listen.
Spring Tide
By Sherri Felt Dratfield
A woman stands on a dune, orange vested.
Her eyes, green, command the sea, will it to stay calm.
Her wavy, sand-colored strands sway in synch with a harmless breeze.
Her heart beats with a rhythmic shoreline that has already forgotten
the ruin left in the wake of its recent
outburst.
The woman stands among a swarm of men in neon-yellow jackets.
They drill holes—
poking in pollen.
She nestles in dune brush,
leans like the patches of tall sea-grass surrounding
her. They are survivors of past storms.
The dune grassers
drill, hum, plant sticks in
slim cavities, dry but willing
to receive these straw bits—
will moisture come,
will roots dig in before more hurricanes arrive?
She bends and plants
on a barren crest,
bends and plants
small stalks,
bends and plants,
bends, plants.
The beach reclaimed, giant pipes are stacked.
The ocean revs, drowns out tractor growls;
the elephantine CAT army scoops up each rusty trunk
to lead the way, bob, sway,
mount, then cross the boardwalk bridge.
Soon all traces of beach-fill machinery will be
gone
to the next site,
down coast.
The woman removes her vest.
She darts a look at the
unrepentant sea.
spunk [arts] magazine
Spunk was started in New York City by Aaron Tilford in the fall of 2003.
Squircle Line Press
Founded by award-winning poet and artist Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingde, Squircle Line Press is a boutique press that publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and whatever else strikes their fancy. Their catalog includes a series of illustrated broadsides with text by notable writers such as Dan Chiasson, Dean Young, Ilya Kaminsky, Amy Gerstler, Forrest Gander, Dan Beachy-Quick, Michael Ryan, Steven Cramer, Orlando Menes and John Wilkinson. Visit their website for submission guidelines for poetry prizes honoring Gertrude Stein and Octavio Paz, and anthologies on unique themes like "pincushion cupcake" and "sandwich wallism".
ST Literary Agency - writers’ break, or just crooked?
Firstwriter.com advises writers to think carefully before signing with ST Literary Agency. ST asks you to provide a $129 "Admin Fee" when you sign up. Other areas of concern: ST is not affiliated with an official industry association such as the Association of Authors' Representatives; few well-established agencies advertise much, since they already receive plenty of manuscripts. ST, however, advertises aggressively; most agencies cultivate a specialty, and reject manuscripts that fall outside it. ST, however, is willing to accept most any manuscript. This caution appeared in Firstwriter's August 2004 newsletter. Subscribe for free.
St. Katherine Review
Founding editors include such notable writers as Scott Cairns and Kathleen Norris. They accept poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and critical essays. Enter by email. No simultaneous submissions.
Stage 32
Stage 32 is a screenwriters' social network and resource site. Basic membership is free. Paid membership tiers include online webinars and intensive classes by entertainment industry professionals, and access to script consultations and pitch sessions.
Stages and Pages
Writer, editor, and theatre professional Francine L. Trevens reviews books, movies, and stage productions at her blog.
Standard Ebooks
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-run nonprofit that converts public domain literary classics to attractive, professionally formatted e-books that are compatible with the most popular e-reader platforms (iBooks, Kindle, and Kobo). If you don't see the book that you want, look for a plain text version at Project Gutenberg and contact Standard Ebooks for help converting it to their format.
Stanley Joel Crown
See website for flash fiction and Mr. Crown's favorite sports novels and movies.
StartBloggingOnline.com
Blogger and social media expert Mike Wallagher created this site to give writers a simple step-by-step introduction to creating their web presence. Topics include choosing a blogging platform, the pros and cons of free versus paid hosting, promoting your blog on Twitter, search engine optimization and digital marketing.
Steel Womb Revisited
Plain-spoken poetry stands up for working-class America with humor, lucidity, and political outrage. Douglass is the publisher of the acclaimed small press Main Street Rag.
Step-by-Step Guide to Dealing with Content Theft
In this article at The Book Designer, a resource website for self-published and indie authors, attorney Helen Sedwick explains how to combat unauthorized uses of your writing. Common infringements include websites offering unlicensed electronic downloads of your books, or reposting or republishing your blog content without attribution.
Steve Fellner
Mr. Fellner's blog features book reviews and critical essays about contemporary LGBT poets.
Stillborn
In my groins the fire of your passionate kicks
Still burns, though lifeless on my lap
Lie your little legs limp and still.
Last night I heard little footsteps on my wooden floor
They scurried through the open door and faded fast
On the wet wings of the monstrous darkness
Tailed by explosion of liquid light and thunder
That unnerved the firmaments and ripped my inside.
Now I know it was you leaving.
Silence sits so serene on your soft blue lips
That never learned to curse and lie.
Though you speak not I hear you loud
As I always have, when you flipped and tumbled
In your cozy water world deep in my belly
That became your deathbed.
What did you say you'd become?
A president, a preacher, pilot, piper, pauper?
It doesn't matter now!
I'm content to know you were here—one of us.
And in your still little veins ran
The hopes and dreams, the passion and pain,
The frailty and fear that make us human.
Copyright 2007 by Obed Dolo
Critique by Jendi Reiter
I chose Obed Dolo's "Stillborn" as this month's critique poem for its intense imagery and assured pacing. There is a wonderful strangeness to this poem that reveals the clashing spiritual forces contained in the child's death, without sacrificing the tenderness and immediacy of the particular relationship. Birth and death: so commonplace yet so mysterious.
I admired this poem's consistency of tone and its use of varied sentence lengths for dramatic effect. Dolo is not embarrassed to employ a prophetic voice worthy of his serious subject matter, and does not break the spell with interjections of casual diction the way a beginning poet might. Minor suggestions for the first stanza: I would change "groins" to the singular "groin" because that is the more common usage, and the unusual form of the word here is distracting. Instead of repeating "little" in two successive lines, perhaps use a different modifier for "footsteps" in the fourth line (e.g. "faint" or "light"), or none at all. The alliteration of "Lie your little legs limp and still" is effective, so I would preserve that instance of the word and replace the other one.
Elegies work best when they connect the commemoration of a specific person to broader insights about finitude, love and loss. Thomas Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard" still resonates with us today because its theme is the universality of death. Gray emphasizes how much is not known about the souls asleep beneath their humble markers, and we nod in recognition because each of us feels like that "mute inglorious Milton" whose significance is obscured by time and mortality.
Against this temptation to despair, the mother in Dolo's poem insists on the preciousness of her child's existence and his membership in the human family. Though he never had a life outside her womb, he was a person, not a thing. Her empathetic imagination turns an unnatural and grotesque object, the corpse of one who died before he could live, back into a baby. Stillborn is transformed into "still born".
In the first stanza, the dead child is alien, characterized in terms of his effects on the mother and the world. She does not yet perceive him as a person, but as a gateway for the chaotic swirl of spiritual power from which the individual soul emerges and to which it returns. He inhabited her body like a fire. Now his departing spirit is glimpsed indirectly, through the sound of ghostly little footsteps or the passage of the storm, which Dolo magnificently describes as "the wet wings of the monstrous darkness/Tailed by explosion of liquid light and thunder". The use of "tailed" instead of the more predictable "trailed" evokes the image of a dragon sweeping by overhead. After these long, action-filled lines, the terse declaration "Now I know it was you leaving" is stark and powerful.
This depiction of the world's darkness and violence sets us up to view the child's death in a new way, as an escape from the potential for misery and wickedness in every human life. "Silence sits so serene on your soft blue lips/That never learned to curse and lie." The mother turns away from the horrors of the first stanza and chooses to re-value both his life and his death. She finds herself able to be grateful for the Edenic existence he must have had inside her body, "when you flipped and tumbled/In your cozy water world deep in my belly," almost as if he were a pre-human innocent creature.
Where a lesser poem might have left us there, with a sentimentalized vision of death as sweeter than life, Dolo comes full circle to acknowledge the tragedy of wasted potential, as well as the tranquility of an unfinished life onto which we can project our own idealized vision of the future. "What did you say you'd become?/A president, a preacher, pilot, piper, pauper?/It doesn't matter now!" The mother acknowledges that the human condition is duality: "The hopes and dreams, the passion and pain,/The frailty and fear that make us human." Birth and death can each be a cause for rejoicing and gratitude, as well as a source of danger and fear.
Where could a poem like "Stillborn" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Eden Mills Writers' Festival Literary Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
Canadian festival offers C$500 for poetry and short stories (both genres compete together) by new, aspiring, and modestly published writers
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Prizes of $100 in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpts
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Stock Photo Resources at Canva
Canva, an online community sharing best practices in web design, has compiled this directory of sources for free stock photos that writers can use for blogs, book covers, and other promotional materials.
Stock Photo Secrets: Best Free Stock Photo Sites
Based in Germany, Stock Photo Secrets is a leading digital magazine dedicated to the stock photography industry. This section of their website explains the legal issues and hidden copyright pitfalls of using photos found online, and reviews two dozen favorite sites for free photos.
Stone. Bread. Salt.
By Norbert Hirschhorn. These wise, good-humored poems explore Jewish legends and mysticism, the blessings and pains of approaching one's ninth decade, and the author's experiences as both physician and patient.
Stoned
By Des Mannay
I'm like a pebble on a beach
with shingle running over me—
A scraping of ecstasy
with the passing of the tides
which are over too soon,
and I am left alone again
With the sun beating down on me—
bleaching me white
and baking the residue of salt
Until I crack—
at least inside I feel I do
But this is never really true
Appetite's whetted by the sea in you—
in reality
you were a piece of shingle
which was soon past
And only myself, the sun and sand
are still here
The skimming stone of life goes on.
First published in the No Tribal Dance anthology in the UK in 2017
Story Circle Book Reviews
Story Circle Book Reviews provides a review venue for women author-publishers and for women's work published by independent and university presses. The site's sponsor, Story Circle Network, also offers the Sarton Women's Book Awards for small press and self-published books by and about women, published in the US or Canada.
Story Monsters Ink
Story Monsters Ink publishes a glossy monthly magazine with children's book reviews, author interviews, and industry news. They also offer contests and publicity packages for indie authors of children's books.
StoryADay Writing Prompts Archive
StoryADay is a twice-yearly writing challenge where participants complete one short story per day in May and September. This website is the online hub for participants, offering inspiration and tips to keep the momentum going. The site includes an archive of prompts from past challenges, going back to May 2010.
Storyathon
Storyathon offers free competitions for students in grades 3-6 to write stories that are exactly 100 words. The challenges are designed to get young people excited about writing and teach them how to tighten their language, experiment with words, and focus their message. See website for new themes offered every semester.
Storyhouse Weekly Reader
The nonprofit Preservation Foundation was born in 1976 to encourage and preserve the "extraordinary stories of 'ordinary' people." Anyone can submit a personal life story or short fictional work for posting on their website. Their e-newsletter, the Storyhouse Weekly Reader, highlights one of the 1,000+ anecdotes in their archives.
