Resources
From Category:
Neglected Books
The Neglected Books blog spotlights "thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste." Posts include reviews, lists, and brief excerpts. Many of the featured works are literary fiction and poetry from the early and mid-20th century, though older works also make an appearance.
Book Series Recaps
Book Series Recaps helps fans catch up on details they have forgotten, in preparation for reading the next book in a series. The site also features spoiler-free book reviews, fan art, discussions, and book quotes. Authors they follow include Leigh Bardugo, Holly Black, Roshani Chokshi, Sarah J. Maas, and Toni Adeyemi. Focus is on YA and fantasy.
Flash Fiction Magazine
Founded in 2014, Flash Fiction Magazine posts a new short-short story online every day. Contributors whose stories are selected for the annual print anthology receive payment. There is also a monthly $100 prize for the best story. Submissions should be 300-1,000 words and be a complete story (no vignettes or prose-poems) with conflict, character development, and resolution.
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.
Cultural Appropriation for the Worried Writer
Jeannette Ng is a medieval studies scholar and author of the British Fantasy Award winning novel Under the Pendulum Sun. In this article for Medium, she discusses how to write responsibly outside your demographic. Some tips: stop looking for fail-safe rules, think critically about your motives and sources, and compensate the people who are teaching you about other cultures.
Layering Place: In Ourselves, in Our Writing
In this 2018 piece from Ruminate Magazine, a faith-informed literary journal, essayist Catherine Hervey discusses ways to flesh out literary characters through the details they notice about a place and the memories that overlay it.
Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon
In this 2018 essay for The Paris Review, literary scholar RL Goldberg recommends contemporary books by transgender and gender-nonconforming writers. Highlighted authors include Eli Clare, Leslie Feinberg, Andrea Lawlor, and Vivek Shraya.
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.
List of Free Online Courses for Authors: The Digital Reader
The Digital Reader is a news and tech blog about publishing, indie authors, e-books, and e-readers. This 2018 post compiles links to reputable free online courses where authors can learn about writing, design, marketing, and public speaking.
Divining Bones
By Charlie Bondhus. This third collection from an award-winning poet stakes its territory in the liminal spaces between male and female, fairy-tale and horror, the archetypal struggle in the psyche and the mundane (but no less dangerous) conflicts of domestic life. The presiding deity of this shadow realm is Baba Yaga, the child-eating forest witch of Eastern European folklore, who guides the narrator to embrace traits rejected by mainstream gay culture. Aging, emasculation, and the grotesque lose their stigma and become sources of transgressive power.
Thanks
By Kaecey McCormick We sit on the cool rocks and watch the stars swing past the moon kicking up the dirt, dropping pixelated tears as they go. It's seeing this with you against the silhouette of our grief: the burned dreams, the small mounds of dirt under too-large stones, our fingers reaching for each other's in the dark. Their laughter breaks through the glass of our memories, turns our shroud to dust, tugs at our lips and pulls up the corners. It dries our eyes with handkerchiefs sewn from patchwork dresses dyed in kindergarten colors and the mood shifts, floats us toward the harvest moon— raises our eyes from the dead. I'm watching you smile as you watch their joy and a quiet thrill grabs my throat because I know what we have though not enough is enough. And my fingers as they stroke the soft flesh on the... [continue]
I Had Buckets
By Howard Faerstein There were arctic ice dams & bent busted eaves in that ramshackle house in the woods— ceiling falling, plaster peeling, lath exposed—& I had buckets, though of different colors, strategically placed so the five cats, exiles also, could lap water at any time in any room. That was when my nails began breaking, then bleeding, my first term as a professor, age fifty, having left the city to teach argument to college freshmen. The Chair provided advice, just remember you're smarter than they are. & the students questioned why I wore bandages on every finger & I confessed my envy of them & lectured them on rhetorical formulas when composing essays on controversial issues; for instance, capital punishment: how my father had killed two men, in self-defense he'd said; environmental sustainability: how Mao's Four Pests campaign eradicated sparrows, leading to the Great Famine when twenty million... [continue]
Art Has an Effect (Make Sure It’s the Effect You Want)
In this blog post from 2018, May Peterson (a/k/a M.A. Peterson), a romance and fantasy novelist and fiction editor, explains that an important goal of "sensitivity reader" edits is to remove inadvertently offensive details that don't advance the vision of the story. All character description is selective, so authors should be glad to prune away careless errors that could dilute readers' connection with the book.
Red Stag Fulfillment’s List of 85 Free Stock Photo Resources
Red Stag Fulfillment is a popular e-commerce fulfillment company, helping web-based businesses track orders and deliver products. In this 2017 article, they offer brief reviews of 85 sites for finding stock photos for your blog, online store, or 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.
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.
The Houses Along the Wall: A Pembrokeshire Poetry Cycle
By Karen Hayes. With stately cadence and tender attention to detail, this poetry chapbook imagines personal histories for a row of old houses in a Welsh seaside village, where a dwindling community depends on tourism to replace the fishing economy. The style and setting have the flavor of T.S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages", without the philosophical pomposity.
Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature
Founded in 1998 in the UK, Banipal is a thrice-yearly magazine featuring English translations of poems, short stories, and novel excerpts by established and emerging Arab writers worldwide. Banipal also publishes book reviews and interviews with authors, publishers, and translators.
In the Street Without My Glasses
By Harry Bauld
Blur sips at the blue bowl
of morning. The heart,
old mole, noses forward
to sense something of steel, maybe
of stone—without a lens the filth
is gone. Unrefracted men and women
regress toward a trembling Monet mean,
trees and marquees go dumb
in the warble of sky,
and even nameless cars
dodging their promised manslaughters
gleam like starlings
under bus faces smeared
to leaf and petal. Someone crosses
the street, a tremolo
of arm, a shudder of color
smoothed to one age, race and sex
as light as that shadow
shimmering off the asphalt
like distant desert heat, the true flicker
we may be. The world
before the uncorrected eye
brims, marbles, quivers
over its boundaries, wells.
The Bare Life Review
Founded in 2017, The Bare Life Review is a literary biannual devoted entirely to work by immigrant and refugee authors. Though the impulse behind its creation was political—to support a population currently under attack—the journal's focus remains wholly artistic, publishing work on a wide variety of themes. Submissions are accepted August 15-November 30. Contributors must be foreign-born writers living in the US, or writers living abroad who hold refugee or asylum-seeker status. Translations are accepted. This is a paying market.
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.
Other People’s Flowers
Launched in 2018, Other People's Flowers is a weekly podcast that showcases submissions of poetry, fiction, and essays. Previously published work is accepted if you own the rights, but the podcast acquires the audio rights to your entry if they read it aloud on the show. Last new episode is from June 2019, but the archive is accessible here.
The Telling Room
Based in Portland, Maine, the Telling Room is a nonprofit writing center for youth aged 6-18. Their programs seek to build confidence, strengthen literacy skills, and provide real audiences for their students. The website includes a list of magazines, contests, and conferences for young writers.
NewPages Young Writers Guide
NewPages is a resource site showcasing independent presses, literary magazines, bookstores, and creative writing programs. This page on their site offers a vetted list of publications and contests that accept work from youth and teens.
Bloody Mary
By Charlie Bondhus
light a candle, chant
at the mirror, and you'll see
her in you: the old murderess,
the bloodthirsty abortionist.
After the twentieth incantation it began
at my chin and spread
across mouth, jaw, and cheeks,
until my lower face was hers.
11 years old I already knew
the joys of being home alone; of leaving
my bedroom door open as I pushed my pubescent cock
and balls up inside, imagining myself
as something else.
When I touched my new hard
lips I thought about Mom,
whose disapproval was stronger than any witchcraft.
But it was already too late.
When I turned on the light
my face had become
sexless as an egg.
Midwest Book Review’s List of Review Sites
Midwest Book Review is a monthly online publication that reviews self-published, small press, and mainstream books in a variety of genres. Their site includes additional resources for author marketing, such as this vetted list of other review organizations and publications that are open to indie books.
Richard Jeffrey Newman
Richard Jeffrey Newman is a contemporary American poet and essayist, trauma activist, and translator of classical Persian literature. His blog discusses such topics as feminism, healing for male survivors of sexual abuse, literary criticism, and the relevance of classical Persian poetry to our contemporary lives. He is also a contributor to the current affairs blog Amptoons.
Pop Sonnets
Updated weekly, the literary humor site Pop Sonnets features popular song lyrics paraphrased as Shakespearean sonnets. Songs that come in for the highbrow treatment include LMFAO's "Sexy and I Know It", Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5", the Village People's "YMCA", and 50 Cent's (a/k/a "Sir Fifty Pence") "In Da Club".
The Web of Language
The Web of Language is Dennis Baron's blog focusing on newsworthy issues in grammar, language usage, and technology. Topics include the history of gender-neutral pronouns, America's politically motivated bans on using foreign languages, what makes a brand name a racial slur, and the interpretation of hate-crimes statutes.
Blanket Sea
Blanket Sea is an online arts and literary journal that showcases creators with mental illness, chronic illness, and disability. The journal is free to read and submit. The editors accept prose submissions up to 2,000 words, but prefer pieces between 500-1,000 words. Creative nonfiction writers may send essays, memoirs, and book reviews in keeping with the themes of chronic physical and mental illness and disability. For fiction submissions, editors gravitate toward contemporary realistic stories about living with illness or disability. The poetry editors look for short, non-rhyming poems with either a narrative angle or a strong message. All submissions must include positive, respectful syntax (see their guide to avoiding ableism and other prejudices). Blanket Sea was the subject of an August 2018 Literary Spotlight feature in The Writer magazine.
Serial Box
Launched in 2018, Serial Box is an app delivering specially-written novels in installments that take about 40 minutes to read. Rather than chopping up existing full-length works, Serial Box features fiction that was designed for the serial format, like episodes of a TV show. Their catalogue of diverse and best-selling authors includes Mary Robinette Kowal, Michael Swanwick, Malinda Lo, Barbara Samuel, Ellen Kushner, and Delia Sherman.
Writing Resources for Veterans at the Iowa Review
The Iowa Review, a prestigious literary journal, has compiled a list of writing resources for military veterans. These include articles on how to run a veterans' writing workshop; journals and contests specializing in military-affiliated writers and themes; and links to workshops around the US.
University of Arizona Poetry Center
The website of the University of Arizona Poetry Center features reference materials such as a digitized collection of writers' portrait photos, a blog with articles and interviews about poetry and education, and a basic guide to the poetry publication process.
Torrey House Press
Based in Utah, Torrey House Press is a nonprofit publisher of literary fiction and nonfiction, with a mission to encourage conservation by telling compelling stories about wilderness and nature. Titles include Scott Graham's mystery series set in America's National Parks and an anthology fundraiser to protect Native American sacred lands.
UnLost: A Journal of Found Poetry
UnLost features poetry and artwork made by transformation, erasure, or collage of other texts and images. Unpublished work is preferred.
The Sea Letter
Launched in 2018, The Sea Letter is a print and online journal that publishes poetry, short fiction, chapters of longer works, and original photography and art. Submissions are accepted year-round. Payment is $50 for poetry and short fiction, $25 for art.
Declaration of Love
By Mary O'Melveny
I love you the most of all!
my grandniece said as we splashed
our way around the park pool,
she in her magenta water wings,
me with my blue exercise noodle.
For that moment it was as true
as anything she has ever said.
Her sincerity was as unimpeachable
as a flawless diamond.
Such love can set a heart aflame
even in the coldest waters.
Tears never spill out
in times of purest belief.
The day will always end well.
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter
By Theodora Goss. Suspenseful but basically light-hearted, this series opener is a fun feminist talkback to the Victorian literary tradition of mad scientists who viewed women as raw material for monstrosities. The daughters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde team up with the Bride of Frankenstein, Nathaniel Hawthorne's poisonous Beatrice Rappaccini, and other not-quite-human women from Gothic fiction to track down a secret society that is performing murderous experiments. The third-person narrative includes frequent first-person intrusions by the characters, teasing each other or disputing how the story is framed. Some might find this editorializing a little too cutesy, as it does lower the dramatic stakes by reassuring the reader that the whole team survives to the end of this adventure. However, the style has the serious purpose of offering an alternative to the solitary hegemonic perspective of the male genius, as well as highlighting its monstrous heroines' common origins in the... [continue]
House of McQueen
By Valerie Wallace. Winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize, this poetry collection inspired by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) captures the meticulousness and melancholy of his oeuvre, though lacking the messiness and horror that gave his work its raw energy. The standout quality of this book is Wallace's innovative use of erasure and recombination of found texts to produce beautifully coherent new poems, some of them in demanding forms like the sonnet sequence. Her collage aesthetic references McQueen's penchant for constructing clothes out of unlikely materials such as seashells, microscope slides, and dried flowers.
Seven Miles of Steel Thistles
Literary scholar and fantasy novelist Katherine Langrish blogs about folklore, fantasy, and ballads from an academic perspective. Topics include C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Hans Christian Andersen, and contemporary authors such as Terry Pratchett and Ursula K. LeGuin. Her book Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Reflections on Fairy Tales (Greystones Press, 2016) collects some of the top essays from this site. In addition to providing insight about beloved classics, the site is a good resource for fantasy authors wishing to think critically about problematic tropes in their genre.
The Prince and the Dressmaker
By Jen Wang. In this perfectly heartwarming graphic novel, set in "Paris at the dawn of the modern age", a special friendship blossoms between a cross-dressing teenage prince and the working-class seamstress who guards his secret. By day, Prince Sebastian dodges his parents' efforts to set him up with eligible young ladies, while by night, he dazzles as fashion icon Lady Crystallia. Meanwhile, Frances wonders how she can achieve her dreams of success as a fashion designer without exposing her royal client's secret. All ends happily in a tale that is suitable for both YA and adult readers.
Her Body and Other Parties
By Carmen Maria Machado. This splendidly original collection of feminist horror and magical realist stories literalizes the metaphors for women's oppression, going to extremes that break through our numb familiarity with these everyday dangers. Women fade, fall apart, are haunted by cast-off parts of themselves. Yet intimacy and sensual pleasure remain alive like flowering weeds pushing through the cracked cement of the most murderous city.
A Thousand Nights at the War Window
By Judith Cody Kashine hospital helipad 1967 Window rectangles seem to be everywhere one over my DDT wet horse hair mattress frames the same scenes night by night flowing in over the ever-restless seas snips of roaring warfare, cut bloodied yells, running bent-in-half men running like strange brown bunraku to claim the night's cargo one by one fresh flown in from Vietnam, broken more or less some to go home and... my eyes clip down against the lens seeking black but down... lands another jumpy mechanical war-bug over my bed out the window frame down... disgorging its bruised babies still sweated from battle into the sanctity of bandaging rooms under the purity of scalpels. 2018 Yesterday, I looked away from the soft summer day in 2018, I looked away for but an instant and out of the corner of my vision the bent-in-half medics are still running, running tending... [continue]
It’s In the Knowing
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
I want to know...
how my marrow
ran in their bones. If these Cycladic figures
inspired Picasso, flat-faced; Miro,
expressionless. But Quakers
who stitched sunbonnet girls
on quilts knew Keros not at all,
nor farmers and fishers,
nor those who pillaged their ancient
shards. Mayans pulled faceless dolls
from husks of corn, never knew this one,
broken arm, vagina visible
between its open legs, harp in its lap. Still
its music melts over five millenniums
to touch me,
allow me to put
my face on its.
The Shadow Gross National Product
By Barbara de la Cuesta
Where does it all go?
Sonatas memorized
Clarinet lessons
Sixteen years worth
Thirty years of
Diaries kept faithfully
Novels in drawers
Out of print
Foreign travel
Photos of
Sketchbooks filled
With long ago nudes, and
Poems on napkins and in
Albums
Painful letters,
Initials carved in trees—ah these
Last longest...
Chemistry notes
Separations negotiated...
Or excruciatingly ripped away
Like bandages from wounds...?
The town dump, you say
Or senescent memory
Or, more sentimentally, in memory
Of friends, descendants...
Not what I mean.
I mean the exquisite learning
Such efforts
Such efforts are said
To alter synapses but
Synapses short circuit don't they
Blow out
In that final effort?
But no,
It must, I say,
All be preserved
Somewhere
In the germ plasma
I say
In the sub atomic particles
I say
Awaiting confirmation
From cosmologists,
Biologists.
They are my
Theologians.
The Meadow
By Scott A. Winkler. Old-fashioned and wholesome, this Vietnam War era coming-of-age novel reminds us that there was more to America in the late 1960s than the coastal counterculture. The eldest son of small-town Wisconsin dairy farmers, high school graduate Walt Neumann is torn between his dreams of becoming a college-educated writer and his rugged, taciturn father's demand that his sons carry on his legacy of military service. Not your typical rebel, Walt deeply honors his family's traditions of hard manual labor and service to the place they call home, but grows to understand that the traumatic stories locked inside the stolid "Greatest Generation" veterans may be preventing an entire nation from learning from its errors. Beautiful writing and sensitive character portraits make this meditative novel a good opener for blue- and red-state Americans to start understanding each other.
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.
Mosaic of the Dark
By Lisa Dordal. A Christian girl wondering where her emerging lesbian-feminist consciousness fits into her faith. A woman grappling with the legacy of her alcoholic, possibly closeted mother. In her debut collection from Black Lawrence Press, Dordal makes these "confessional" themes fresh and strange again by centering her poems on a tangential detail which, after careful rereading, telescopes out into a larger narrative. The technique is reminiscent of those close-up photo puzzles in science magazines, where you must guess the whole animal from an abstract shimmer of scales or feathers.
Alien Pub
Founded in 2018, Alien Pub is an online literary and art journal edited by Queen's University (Ontario) students, with a special interest in politically transformative work. Submissions are open year-round via email. Editors say, "Alien Pub is an independent space for creative activism and transgressive media. We look for work that includes themes of justice, resistance, identity, and autonomy. We want to celebrate voices of those who have been and continue to be marginalized, and make their stories front and centre. We want work that subverts social norms and challenges existing power structures. Experiment with us; push every creative boundary you can imagine." They describe themselves further as "trans-positive and anti-oppressive."
Literary Translators’ Association of Canada
The Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (LTAC) is devoted to promoting the art of literary translation and the interests of the profession. Providing access to literature written in other languages and conveying culture across linguistic lines, LTAC members translate works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama into 20+ languages. LTAC offers contests, workshops, conferences, and an online directory of translators.