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The Whole 9
Free online job board features calls for artists, writers, performers, and graphic designers, plus contests and other opportunities for creative people.
The Whore’s Child and Other Stories
Deftly drawn portraits of intimate relationships explore how the people closest to us may be the most mysterious. In the title piece, an elderly nun in a fiction writing class writes her memoirs in defiance of the teacher's expectations, but the exercise reveals that the true story is different from what she had thought it to be. Other pieces gently probe the strengths and weaknesses of long-married couples, and how they are held together as much by the fictions they believe as by the truths they know about one another.
The Wicken Bird
By Geoffrey Heptonstall
A glimpse of feathers in the reeds.
And the air carries the spring's return
where the rain tastes of the sun
when other birds are sought
from the world beyond.
An instinct conferring grace
over land and water
passing through nature's dreams
prepared for a life of flight.
The marshland melody foretells
a future watchful and winged,
an ancestral enchantment
woven in a thread of grass.
We search the sky for signs
only the clear eye can see
for the coming season
of beauty and strength in song.
In the bird world lovers are chosen
to bind desire in harmony.
All else is curious intrusion,
a cuckoo's egg of course.
The Wild
She would have sworn up and down That there was nothing more common Than the constant drip-dripping of the farm faucet. The warm monotone of hot water against steel Cancelled the emotion in the farmer's voice. She didn't have a choice But to sit there and wait For one more syllable to explode. And what a heavy load for such a young girl. She'd been alive for eight years and still laughed like a child But the scars on her thigh showed that she's battled the Wild. Beneath the eyes of a woman, she wore a little girl's pout As she lined her wall with shards of glass to keep the Wild out. Scorpion corpses laced the side of the empty chalet. Like trust, their bodies took an instant to break, And an eternity to mend. By then, the screamers from the barn Refused to be reconciled with their laughing... [continue]
The Wishing Tomb
Winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, this exquisite collection surveys the cultural history of New Orleans over three centuries, in poems that quiver and shake with music and surge with the violence of floods. End-notes provide background on the incidents that inspired each poem.
The Witch Boy
By Molly Knox Ostertag. This lovely middle-grade graphic novel features a youth whose magical skills transgress the gender roles of his community. All the girls in Aster’s extended family are supposed to become witches, and the boys, animal shapeshifters who defend them from evil spirits. However, Aster’s passion is for witchery. With the help of Charlie, a non-magical girl from the neighboring suburb, he uses his forbidden talent to fight a monster in a way that only he can. Charlie, who has two (off-page) dads, is uniquely sympathetic to Aster’s dilemma because she’s a female athlete struggling for equal opportunities at her school. Both children are people of color, and Aster’s extended family includes a variety of ethnicities. The artwork, in cozy earth tones, is clear and expressive, and not too scary for younger readers.
The World’s Wife
The wives of mythic figures get their say at last.
The Wrestler’s Cruel Study
By Stephen Dobyns. Poet and noir mystery novelist Dobyns branches out into philosophical farce in this ensemble-cast comedy set in early 1990s New York City, where wrestling matches re-enact early Christian disputes about the nature of evil, and anyone's life might unwittingly mimic a Grimm's fairy tale. What holds this capacious story together is the idea that truth is only manifested through artifical personae and constructed narratives—what wrestlers call their Gimmicks—and if there is free will, it consists of noticing your Gimmick and maybe choosing a different one.
The Write Life
The Write Life is a one-stop shop for information on how to make a living as a writer. Their annual "100 Best Websites for Writers" list showcases their favorite resources for freelancing, book marketing, blogging, literary craft advice, and inspiration for the long haul.
The Write Life’s 100 Best Websites for Writers in 2019
The Write Life, a writing resource site, compiles this annual list of their favorite websites in 10 categories: freelancing, inspiration, writing tools, blogging, creativity and craft, editing, podcasts, marketing and platform building, writing communities, and publishing.
The Writer Magazine
In print since 1887.
The Writer Magazine: Essays About Writing
The Writer Magazine is a well-established guide to writing, editing, and marketing your work. This page on their website collects links to their past articles with inspirational tips for writers. Topics include finding the heart of your story, balancing writing and parenting, and resisting negativity from your inner critic.
The Writer’s Almanac
A daily program of poetry and history hosted by Garrison Keillor, suffused with his characteristic nostalgia and humor. Each day presents a pithy new poem and recalls birthdays of famous writers and artists, unusual holidays and resonant historical events. Rich food for a literary mind. Sign up to receive the Almanac each morning by email. The website archives past issues.
The Writer’s Hotel at The New Guard
The Writer's Hotel is the teaching and editorial arm of the literary journal, The New Guard. The Writer's Hotel hosts a writing conference in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry each June at a "floating campus" in Midtown Manhattan between three hotels with a literary history: The Library, The Algonquin, and The Bryant Park Hotel. The conference includes virtual pre-study with Editors Shanna McNair and Scott Wolven and on-site workshops, lectures, agent speed dating, literary events, and student readings in the city at KGB Bar Lit, The Bowery, and Book Culture. Via The Writer's Hotel, TWH editors also offer a year-long course called "Private Study", which functions much like a low-residency creative writing course.
The Writer’s Workout
Launched in 2014, The Writer's Workout is a resource site with features including a discussion forum, submission calls, prompts, a newsletter, and a literary journal called WayWords. For $1/month you can use their Achievement Tracker to organize your submissions and drafts. The site's editors say, "It's designed and tested to help you measure all your literary progress: the Achievement Tracker shows your total word count, competition wins, reading, editing, publications, and more throughout the year as well as your daily and monthly average word count. Seeing these totals and averages helps you develop constructive writing habits, encourages you to try different things, and provides a clear visual of your growth."
The Writers’ Union of Canada: Awards & Competitions
Canadian writers should take note of these quality fiction and nonfiction contests. Prizes are awarded for individual pieces, collections, writing for children and short-shorts.
The Year of Yellow Butterflies (The Blog)
This site is the blog companion to Joanna Fuhrman's book The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press, 2015), a collection of poems about fads and trends from imaginary pasts. Readers who wish to contribute their own prose-poems beginning "It was the year of..." may submit them through the blog contact form along with a short bio. Contributors to the site have included Maria Garcia Teutsch, Susan Lewis, Maureen Thorson, and a 5-year-old named Ian.
theNewerYork
tNY is interested in new, forgotten, and experimental literary forms of short fiction: aphorisms, flash-fiction, user's manuals, surveys, lists, punctuationless stories, upside down stories, inside out stories, lipograms, faux press releases, fake book reviews, dialogues, scriptcerpts, epigrams, and other absurdities. They publish an annual chapbook-sized anthology, as well as the Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, a somewhat searchable online collection of unusual flash prose and artwork.
There must be a way to listen
By Laurie Klein
like a small body of water,
reflective face, upturned: benign,
an entity of acceptance.
Water embraces the sunken. The near-dying
as well as the thriving stir, like plants
practicing grace as they lean on the current.
Let me be a haven, where shared sediments
settle. Where buoyancy reasserts itself.
Where you will beckon the weathered vessel,
and I will coax the reluctant toe.
We'll soften the chipped margins of shells,
castoffs, the chronically stony. Encompassed,
eased, the survivor rises
the way a trout breaks from silence, to surface,
old hooks and lines ingrown, jaws half-trussed—
wounds revealed, by one seeking a witness.
What was it the risen one said? Hark.
Flow and do likewise.
They Remember War
Writecorner Press editor Robert B. Gentry interviewed residents of the Oak Hammock retirement community at the University of Florida in Gainesville who were veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Their oral histories are collected on this page on Writecorner's website.
Thief in the Interior
By Phillip B. Williams. This debut collection from Alice James Books is a formally innovative, visceral and intense collection of poems through which the American tradition of violence against gay and black male bodies runs like a blood-red thread. From concrete poetry collages to experimental sonnets, Williams makes us contemplate murder as a twisted outburst of intimacy across caste lines, and love as a battle cry. Winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Thirst
By Tricia McCallum
The sun was hotter.
You can tell.
Look at us squinting against it in photos then.
Everything washed out by the glare,
cheekbones, jawlines,
all detail surrendered.
Dazzled,
we could be anybody.
The gardens, look, they're parched.
It hurt to walk on the grass.
We lay in scorched backyards
slathering butter on our chests,
chain-smoking, eating fluorescent cheesies,
swilling bright red soda.
Everyone burned raw.
And we knew
nothing could go wrong.
Our lives lay ahead of us.
Men were above us,
landing on the moon.
This poem is reprinted from The Music of Leaving (Demeter Press, 2014). It was first published at Goodreads.com as the winner of their December 2011 poetry contest.
This Book Is Anti-Racist
By Tiffany Jewell. This social justice handbook for middle-grade and young adult readers offers tools for understanding your identity and social position, unlearning myths of American history, affirming yourself in a prejudiced world, and using your privileges to disrupt racism. Upbeat, energetic illustrations by Aurelia Durand create a mood of hope and momentum for dealing with tough truths. Jewell's background in Montessori education is reflected in her trusting and empowering young people to make mature moral choices.
This Gardener’s Impossible Dream
Light verse from the Georgia Poetry Society's former vice president, featuring both original works and translations of French poems by La Fontaine, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud.
This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon
This luminous collection of linked stories takes the risk of positing a universe where tragedy and confusion do not get the last word. The narrator's acerbic wit and unsparing assessments of human nature, particularly her own, earn credibility for the moments of grace that always break in to redeem her family's love-hate relationships.
This Time Last Year
By Pamela Sumners This time last year a neighbor who always lingers to talk asked me if we'd noticed the silence of the chimney swifts and the nighthawks lately. I had not. This year, with no hum of traffic, with just the shrieks of little girls in their speckled-egg Easter leggings tramping the fenced back yard, I do breathe in the full orchestral range of the birds: the grackles with their puffed-out pipe whistle plunging so rapidly deep into a guttural caw, the chimney swifts' high-toned chattering, able to call out while still on the wing, foraging my deck for seeds, battling each other but sharing with the sparrows. Their claws unfit for perching, swifts lurch straightaway and bathe by doing a water glide in flight, their pond in this case a blue plastic wading pool we keep for the dogs. The swifts cling to the mortar joists to... [continue]
Thistlefoot
By GennaRose Nethercott. In this extraordinary work of Jewish magical realism, the American great-great-grandchildren of legendary Eastern European witch Baba Yaga inherit her chicken-legged hut, and find themselves tasked with laying the ghosts of the pogroms to rest. The story is undergirded by a traditionally Jewish vision of death and the afterlife, in which being remembered by your descendants is the most important form of immortality. The Yaga descendants, whose magical powers have their hidden roots in Jewish survival skills, must do battle with the personification of genocidal forces that would erase not only a marginalized people but even the memory of their existence. And there is a traveling puppet show, and a monster-hunting band of queer rock musicians, and a lesbian romance with an animated graveyard statue. What more could you ask for?
Thoughts on Structure
In this 2011 essay from the Ploughshares blog, poet and writing professor Weston Cutter urges writers of free verse to give more conscious thought to the reasons for their structural choices. Visual components such as stanza breaks, line breaks, and margins should be chosen to enhance the meaning and sound of the poem.
Three Declarations
1. How we position ourselves for our inner audience: you the reconciler, I the fighter who besets you and is embraced finally, all I've ever wanted from anger. You see honesty in me—after water, it alone saves us. I will always be the rattlesnake sidewinding your desert, the wash flooded, then dry, the acid pool that burns you down to life's essentials. Come closer, I say. Wash your hands. 2. Our story truly began when you plucked me too young to bloom from a dry bed—tequila spines drawing your blood. You anchored a desert garden with me: evening primrose, the invader, ice plant with its jelly bean leaves, pink pussytoes for gossip—even yucca, that loner, as a sentinel. And always, the romance of the yucca moth. Dizzy with love, you would divide me, sink me in pots for others to plant, in all 200 countries. But I say, don't return... [continue]
Three Percent
A project of the University of Rochester's publishing house Open Letter Books, Three Percent is a resource for international literature. Their blog features reviews of world literature in translation. They also offer the Best Translated Book Award with sponsorship from Amazon.com.
Three Poems
# 1 if i put the pen in the flame the damn thing will melt dropping black ink into the yellow heat so small but so hot capable of major injury and harm but will i be careless I don't think I choose that kind of pain written in my blood with spilt black ink bubbling and cooking my flesh damn pen # 2 time to clean out the closet the dust and unused books of directions the funny photographs with the finger in front of the lens the lost pasta box with one strand of thin spaghetti remaining the birthday hat converted to new year's eve in two thousand and five i sneeze and curse the dirt my fingertips begin their transformation to grey i cough and wipe my nose on my dusty sleeve memories spill to the floor winding up in the tall green trash making room for... [continue]
Three-Petaled Love Ghazal
All Other Loves The Infant Warrior sings in every tongue, inflames all other loves. Beware ravishings of the swaddled One who contains all other loves. When did my desire turn on me with its green hunger, its hollow teeth? My craving craves me back: pinched and jealous god who slays all other loves. Poplars glint and shimmy in their spangled chorus line. They shiver, swept by gusty fingers of a flirting sylph who disdains all other loves. I abandon my mandrake garden. Now cankered roots poison the ground. Juicy djinn's eggs, stolen for my silver bowl, red-stain all other loves. Moses said. Moses said. He's dead. All the Earth is Egypt in the egg. O Exodus hatched from the plagues of those gods, unchain all other loves. Language ladled into Karen like alphabet soup from deep Word wells: bright clad children queue to crazy-quilt the looped refrain, "all other loves".... [continue]
Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders
By Joy Ladin. Lyrically written, introspective, and mystical, this soul-searching and honest memoir explores the freedom, costs, and responsibilities of becoming your true self. Poet and English professor Joy Ladin describes how she became the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish college, Yeshiva University in New York City. Through the silent suffering of growing up as the wrong gender, and the breakup of her marriage and family when she came out, Ladin drew strength from her deep connection to the enigmatic but ever-present God of the Torah, and she developed creative interpretations of Jewish tradition to make space for queer flourishing.
Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature
Interfaith journal of spiritual literature; editorial board includes several prominent writers.
Till We Have Faces
In this fantasy novel loosely based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche, an unloved queen recounts her grievances against the gods, only to discover the struggle between selfish and unselfish love in her own soul. This is Lewis' most "feminist" book, showing a remarkable grasp of women's experiences in a male-dominated society.
Tim Weed’s Storycraft Blog
Tim Weed is an award-winning novelist, lecturer, and travel-writing program director. His "Storycraft" blog analyzes great novels and short stories from a craft perspective to help aspiring fiction writers. Featured authors include Tolkien, Hemingway, Steinbeck, James Joyce, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, John Le Carré, Donna Tartt, Ray Bradbury, Phillip Pullman, Peter Carey, Leslie Marmon Silko, and many others. There are also more general posts on the importance of narrative in the modern age, what literature can do that film cannot, the archetypal Shadow in fiction, the art of the scene, and more.
Timothy Steele
Dr. Steele is a professor emeritus of English at California State University, Los Angeles. See his website for selections from his poetry and critical essays as well as a useful introduction to traditional poetic forms and meters.
Timothy Steele
Website of neo-formalist poet Timothy Steele, a professor emeritus of English at California State University, Los Angeles, includes selections from his poetry and critical essays as well as a useful introduction to traditional poetic forms and meters.
Tincture
Lethe Press is a well-regarded small press with an interest in queer literature. Their imprint Tincture is dedicated to publishing LGBT authors of color. Books in their catalog include the anthologies From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction and Walking the Tightrope: Poetry and Prose by LGBTQ Writers from Africa, as well as individual titles by Nathan Goh, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Timothy Wang, and others.
TinFish Press
An adventurous small press in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Founded in 1995 by Susan M. Schultz, TinFish publishes experimental poetry and prose from the Pacific, including Hawaii, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Australia, California and western Canada. "Tinfish uses recycled materials, including tarpaper, weather maps, proof sheets, and hamburger sleeves to cover its always un-recycled poetry and prose." Bestsellers include Sista Tongue by Lisa Linn Kanae and Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture by Lee "Da Pidgin Guerilla" Tonouchi. Read an article about TinFish in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
Tinnitus
By Barbara Regenspan
1
The cicadas come to me
at three in the morning.
The trees
are inside the room,
hiding in darkness.
The dust on the floor
belongs now
as particles of soil,
until morning
when they'll reclaim their soul
as dirt.
2
He said, there are crystals in your ear.
I can break them up with one painful tweak.
He did; they didn't.
He said, your mind is stretching to hear
what it used to—and can no longer—
so it generates sound to fill the silence.
3
She knows now: on its way out,
everything is vibrating; hear it
and try not to answer. Let it stand in
for the last beautiful word.
Tint Journal
Tint is an online literary journal for ESL (English as a second language) writers. They publish poetry, fiction, essays, flash prose, author profiles, and articles with writing advice.
tinywords
tinywords is a daily online journal of haiku and micropoetry (150 characters maximum). Sign up to receive a poem a day by email or text message.
Tip of My Tongue
Search this database of dictionaries for that word you can't quite remember. You can input meanings, syllables, sound-alikes, and letters that it should or shouldn't include. This free reference site is created and maintained by writer and software designer. Chirag Mehta
Tips for a Good Poetry Reading
This post from award-winning poet Diane Lockward's blog offers sound advice for poets, hosts, and audience members. Lockward is the author of What Feeds Us and Eve's Red Dress, both from Wind Publications. (Hat tip to The Practicing Writer newsletter for the link.)
To Everyone Who Wants Me to Read Their Writing and Tell Them What to Do
In this 2022 blog post, publishing expert Jane Friedman talks about the benefits and limits of asking for feedback as a beginning writer. The takeaway: perseverance and passion are more important than any one person's opinion. "If I were to tell you today that your project is a waste of time, would you abandon it? If so, perhaps it's best that you did. To keep writing in the face of rejection is required of every professional and published writer I know."
To Trope or Not to Trope
In this 2017 essay from the blog of the literary journal Ploughshares, Chloe N. Clark discusses four stories that self-consciously re-use common fictional tropes about women in order to subvert these tropes. While beginning writers are often told to avoid clichéd roles for their characters, it can be an effective postmodern literary technique to make the characters themselves aware of and commenting on the limited identities they are forced to embody.
Too Much Horror Fiction
Will Errickson is the co-author, with Grady Hendrix, of Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction (Quirk Books, 2017), a popular history of the pulp horror paperback in its heyday. Errickson's blog reviews notable and campy titles from the 1960s-90s, a number of which are being reissued now by Valancourt Books.
TOON Books
TOON Books publishes high-quality comic books for children, designed to teach verbal and visual literacy in a more engaging format than traditional books for first readers. Editorial Director Françoise Mouly is the Art Editor of The New Yorker magazine. Notable contributors include Art Spiegelman, Hilary Knight (creator of Eloise), and Neil Gaiman.
Top 100 Book Review Blogs for Readers and Authors
Feedspot, a site that aggregates content across the Web, compiled this list of book review blogs that have the highest visibility in terms of Google search ranking, social media presence, and consistent quality of posts. The list includes both general-interest and genre-specific sites such as romance, children's books, and fantasy.
