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Wedge of Blacktop, Saturday, 1955
By Paul Scollan
All they could wish was this wedge of blacktop
by the back-porch stoop of this matchbox cape
in this shirt-cling evening of a dog-day swoon,
the breadloaf radio set out on the rail,
the longneck beers, dead soldiers on the stairs,
Blanche kicking high in her grease-stained dress,
her great girth tweaking like she's traveling light,
Chaz winging free right into tomorrow in
his busman's pants, his spit-shined shoes,
a sleeveless top, sweet jazz in his moves
to the toot of Duke in "It Don't Mean a Thing,"
and a switch of the dial to slow it all down
to arms ringing round to doo-wop sounds could
roll honey up the hill of the house next door.
Weird Old Book Finder
This quirky search engine designed by tech writer Clive Thompson browses Google Books to show public-domain books from the 18th century to the 1920s, one at a time, based on your search terms. Rather than a straighforward research tool, it's a vehicle for finding unusual texts and illustrations to spark your imagination. Before using it, read Thompson's blog post about how to get the most out of your search.
Welcome Table Press
Welcome Table Press publishes anthologies of contemporary and classic literary essays, and the periodical pamphlet series Occasional Papers on Practice & Form, which features transcripts of lectures on writing and teaching the essay form. See website for free downloads of excerpts from these publications, as well as an annual contest judged by Robert Atwan, series editor of The Best American Essays.
Wendy Wahman Illustration
The website of children's book illustrator Wendy Wahman includes links to animated videos of her stories.
Wergle Flomp Entries by Anthony McMillan, Maria St. Clair and Mark Stevick
This month, the Critique Corner looks at more runners-up from the 2004 Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest, in our continuing quest to define poetry so bad it's good. INTERNECINE WITH SPAM by Anthony McMillan I acquiescence to Spam, nothing left... But that one can, acidulous; sitting alone On the shelf, obeisance to the Cag-mag, This has gotten out of hand; I am broken -------The can must be opened------- I feel a little nostalgie de la boue, as the top of The can is removed, for it reminds of darkly days When hunger had its ways and smashed pork in a can Seemed almost toothsome and grand. Now I am throe and threnody, loathing my penury As I spoon the scoria out into a bowl. It squishes on the spoon, its sibilants, some Domestic swine like tune; that I cannot understand But imagine its saying, "Damn, I'm dead/cut up... [continue]
Wergle Flomp Entries by B.F. Texino, Rebecca Sutton and “Chick L Scott”
This month's critique corner analyzes three of the near-miss entries from our 2004 Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest, which rewards poetry that is deliberately, hilariously bad. UNTITLED ("I got this bag of oats..." by B.F. Texino I got this bag of oats for the goats but it is not the sort of food for them, the goats. So I make the list for all the animal to see who it is that are wanting them, the oats Here is the list now read it. The Chicken The Dog The Monkey The Donkey The Hog The Horse Rats and Mice in pit. Now we will take some names away because some animals says no way no oats The Chicken? Sorry he must die for food are not oats food says Jesus. Sorry Jesus, We love Chicken! not oats. The Dog? Good Dog! No Oats. Monkey? Monkey-Devil Monkey-Devil Monkey-Devil! Guess who? Shut... [continue]
Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest Winners
This contest sponsored by Winning Writers pokes fun at the low standards of vanity poetry contests by awarding prizes for poems so bad they're good. From the off-color to the merely off-the-wall, these poems will give you a good laugh while also instructing you in how well-intentioned serious work can go awry. Squeamish folks beware.
West Branch
Reading period is August 15-April 15. Enter through online submission manager. This is a paying market.
What Editors Want: A Must-Read for Writers Submitting to Literary Magazines
In this essay from the online bulletin of the literary journal Glimmer Train, Lynne Barrett gives new writers an overview of the magazine editing process and offers tips to help your submission succeed. Barrett is the author of several short fiction collections and the editor of The Florida Book Review.
What He Left
By Charlie Bondhus I know it's broken, but the cool, dark potential still unnerves me. Many things are wrong: something (the bullets?) rattling like coins in a jar, the bright silver firing pin snapped like a link in an old rosary. Its black weight makes my hands crinkle, two leaves flaking apart; the only way I can hold a thing so potent is with the knowledge that the moving parts are immobilized. It's always been this way, loving chrome-cut men, so solid there's not a hollow space to accommodate the rising contractions of the heart. You showed it to me one day, explained hammers, pins, and primer; cartridges and sparks, mechanical energy and chemical reactions, you said firing a gun is a little like writing fiction; there's an initiating action, a chain of events, the moment of crisis, and then the falling tension, the irrevocable resolution, but, I know... [continue]
What I Call Erosion
By Kelli Russell Agodon Today's sea seems tired of stealing acres of sand from the beach. What I call erosion, the waves call: I wish the wind would stop rushing us, I wish we could just take it slow. In the beauty of whitecaps, I sometimes see sadness, sometimes how lucky we are to watch the sunrise one more time. There's so much we're carrying these days— an osprey with a fish in its talons, a killdeer runs across the dunes trying to distract us from its nest. Danger, even when it's not, is everywhere. Sometimes I pretend to have a broken wing as I look out the window. But then a cloudscape in a world of buffleheads, of saltwater roses, and I forget fear. It's 7 a.m. on a Thursday and an otter is pretending none of my concerns matter. The otter, if laughter was a mammal, is... [continue]
What Is Creative Nonfiction?
The website of well-regarded literary journal Creative Nonfiction offers articles on how to define the genre, its signature techniques, and sample essays from the magazine.
What Is There?
What is there? What is there, when looking out From the narrow sill of your eye, Window to what is? What will you see When you finally see? Light and dark limit the possibilities. Does light pool like a fluid around the little shards of matter Disguised as dogs and cars and trees? Can you drown in the all? I think the ocean of what is Is there only for me. I hear its incessant surf beat upon the strands of my mind. I am so alone in here, I welcome the sound. What is there? How do you define it? Everyday, I bang a drum; The vibrations propagate Across the lawn Over Jim's house, They ring all around Kobb Boulevard And then they bounce off the shells of air and ripple Upon the placid sea of stars that swells with the night. And the sound that returns to me,... [continue]
What She Said
Provocative poetry chapbook by a Palestinian-American writer whose creative and academic work on Middle Eastern and women's issues has been widely anthologized. The title poem in this collection was a finalist in our 2004 War Poetry Contest.
What the Living Do
Autobiographical collection is an elegy to the poet's brother, who died young from AIDS. These verses are poignant and true.
What the Prince Doesn’t Know
By Maureen Sherbondy
Two months ago the mammogram revealed
a lump, and days since then have passed.
She can no longer throw her hair over the wall
for him to shimmy up beneath the star-scarred sky.
In a nauseous-chemo blur, clumps of golden thread
fell from her head to the tower's cold stone floor.
Still, the witch keeps her here, caged and ill, the left breast
completely gone. Her head a pale bald egg.
So when the Prince yells up to her, Rapunzel, throw down
your golden hair, she hides beneath the sterile sheets.
#
(First published in On the Dark Path: An Anthology of Fairy Tale Poetry)
What Type of Book Editing Do You Need? And When?
This article from self-publishing and marketing service BookBaby, by professional editor Jim Dempsey of Novel Gazers, explains the three types of editing that every manuscript needs before publication, and when to do each one. The page includes links to other useful articles on the same theme.
What We Have Learned to Love
Raw, tender poems of gay male love and lust, and the blurry line between them. This chapbook won the 2008-09 Stonewall Competition from BrickHouse Books.
When Do I Earn Out?
Fantasy novelist and software engineer Hana Lee created this free online calculator to determine how many books you must sell to earn out your advance. Input your royalty rates and list prices for hardcover, paperback, e-book, or audiobook sales to see your sales targets and how much your publisher will earn.
When Grief Becomes Surreal
In this 2016 article from Literary Hub, Tobias Carroll surveys some techniques that great novels and films have used to show the reality-distorting effect of grief and other overpowering emotions. Carroll is the managing editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn and the author of the novel Reel (Rare Bird).
When Space Was Big
By Samantha Terrell
When we are small
And space is big,
And there are so many unknowns
We can't hope to know them all;
When there are brighter stars
In a bigger sky
And the distant future
Is really, truly, very far,
There is a hope, too—
A motivation to keep on
Living past the moment,
To do something unique and new
Before time gets shorter, and spaces smaller,
And the world's pains
Grow bigger,
And the stars, dimmer;
Before the irony of life sets
In, and we learn to get lost in smallness,
Forgetting the world that
Once gave us its vastness.
When the Day Lilies Open
By Mary M. Sesso
She awakens sleep-deprived
on the oncology ward
offended by the cloudy light
that's opening the day lilies
in her back yard.
Cancer has again pruned away dreams not about itself&mdash
it wants to own her breasts,
dream about spreading
its wings.
She's angry at the malice
of bruises that crowd
her arms like flower buds,
gaudy shades of purple,
green, yellow.
And she's growing tired
of the middle and wonders
how it will end, weary of that face
with dark socketed eyes
straining to see the impossible.
But the sky turns cerulean blue,
heaven blue, and hope
puts down a tiny root
even as a poppy bruise
flowers around the I.V.
When You Write
Editor Jessica Majewski reviews technical tools for writers and offers productivity tips at her website When You Write. Check out her recommendations of the best keyboards, dictation software, grammar-checking programs, editing services, and more.
Where is the custom of raising a glass
By David Kherdian
Where is the custom of raising glass
to a dead companion of old?
No memorials to visit, friends
scattered, lost. Tender moments
come and go and have no place.
Like sediment, when the wine is drunk,
left in the glass, forgotten
Where the Meadowlark Sings
By Ellaraine Lockie. This widely published writer is known for narrative poems that capture the unique character of a place and its people. In her eleventh chapbook, winner of the 2014 Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, she returns to her native Montana to honor the land that her parents and grandparents farmed. The collection includes humorous character sketches, elegies for towns hollowed out by economic collapse, and love songs to the landscape that revives her spirit.
Where to Find Free Short Stories Online
This 2019 list from the literary website BookRiot links to high-quality online sources for free short fiction, including prestigious journals such as Granta, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, and American Short Fiction, as well as leading sci-fi and fantasy sites like Tor.com and Lightspeed Magazine.
Where to Publish Flash Nonfiction and Micro-Essays
This 2021 article from the website of Erika Dreifus, poet and editor of the writers' resource newsletter The Practicing Writer, lists more than 50 reputable literary journals that publish short-form creative nonfiction.
While I’m Sleeping
By Gary Greene I imagine that as I sleep at night she may come to sit in her chair or lie on her couch, so I leave on a superstitious light and ensure both are clear, as there's nothing to be gained by upsetting a ghost. So my heart doesn't break completely, I made up a rule and that is she can't allow me to see her. I haven't worked out why, exactly, but it must be true, as I haven't. I check for impressions from time to time, but there are only the marks left by my own hand where I've smoothed the velour, which I do to make it easier to see some errant sign she might leave, never on purpose, as (another rule) that's not allowed either, but maybe, one early morning a tear will slide down her cheek unnoticed as she hurries to depart when... [continue]
Whisper Without Words
They are all the same The night Laughs the last and loudest My friends Invariably Are anxious to creep Walk taller And pride their budding beards This is our fate That before the sun Dies down These children Should all elope silently And with silence Leave us To our face Swollen, and ugly with silence How may we know Those alive Seeing that they Have chosen Our hearts to walk? A royal flower When fading from royalty And longing for shame From nature's tempered elements Too harsh to befriend. Many a gentle gardener Allows the gentle dame A gentle passage Through waiting earth And she returns only to return Yet, not in a fellow flower's soul. How may we know Those with us Seeing The dead Have left their graves To be with us? The war had many returns Her sweet fruit Drove our peering eyes to its hut Retreating... [continue]
Whispers
Mile after mile of trees border the highway. She gasps. The Maples' fiery red, the creamy white petals of the Magnolias, the verdant Evergreens standing side by side lining the forest wall, as though guarding its history. It's her first visit to the south. The early morning breeze rushes through the car's open windows, battering her windswept hair as her eyes greedily search for the unfamiliar. She spots a shadowed grove littered with deadfall, like corpses strewn across a battlefield, blemishing the landscape of soft and dark greens, tinged with sunlight. She hears a chorus of sounds; a rustling amongst the trees, ghostly whispers conjuring up visions of secrets buried long ago, in unmarked, unblessed graves. Passing trees at 65 mph, she spots an Oak and strains her neck for a quick look back at a tree whose branches, as history records, were once adorned, hung, and weighted down... [continue]
White Man’s Grave
By Richard Dooling. This anti-colonialist satire from the early 1990s holds up extraordinarily well. One could describe it as a talkback to Heart of Darkness combined with Tom Wolfe's style of exaggerated depictions of American folly and greed. When a Peace Corps volunteer goes missing in the jungle of an unnamed West African country, his naive Midwestern best friend embarks on a quest to rescue him, blundering dangerously and ridiculously into a web of intrigue involving witchcraft, foreign-backed coups, and misdirected international aid. Meanwhile, the missing man's father, a ruthless bankruptcy lawyer, starts to fear that he's been hexed...and that maybe he deserves it.
Whiteout
This snow is a set of wings come undone. Or is it my heart feathered and flaked in suspended descent? It's been coming down all day. A restless sparrow, wintering in my breast, beats within this hollow— the span of your love, the size of your hand. Take heart! (You did.) Take flight, burdened wings wet with this affliction of want. My world is disappearing from the ground up. White gone white upon relentless white covering my tracks. Covering this and that— the definition of our days, your rake and my spade. Our garden lost its shape. The lamb's ears, first to go. And now the earth itself gone cold, cold, cold. I'm sickened with the gentle slope. This vanishing. This wind that wings your absence. The drift against my fence— a row of sharpened pickets with barely a point left. Copyright 2004 by Laura Van Prooyen Critique by... [continue]
Who Pays Writers?
Who Pays Writers? is an online directory of blogs, magazines, and literary journals that pay for accepted work, with information on their current pay rates. Some entries include more information about the difficulty of breaking in to that market, how it compares to other publications in its genre, and the amount of reporting required for a pitch or article.
Whose Voice Is This?
By David Dragone Your heart is bloodied enough so be kind to it mindful of its confinement— about how it's been taken into custody by your jailer's voice— how its scolding sentence is born in the room behind your eyes— about how the mouth that whispers your doubt is doing hard time behind despairing windows— your thirsty ears clapped in irons for years in a house of scarce applause. Maybe every cell in your body right down to the most guarded is looking for a skeleton key so you can open the dungeon door and break away from the chains that pain you in your cage. Maybe you'll wonder why as you turn the lock, your captor— the one with the ugly tongue is staring at you from the cracked mirror just like mine was as I walked away and my better voice finally reflected and asked... Whose voice... [continue]
Why Are We In Iraq
Poetry website dedicated to giving the poets of the 21st century a place to speak out about a world consumed with war, peace, religious intolerance, military strategy, violence and hate. Featured authors include Anne Caston, Frederick Van Kirk, and Ronald Wallace. See website for submission guidelines.
Why Write Characters of Color?
In this essay from the bulletin of acclaimed literary journal Glimmer Train, award-winning short story writer Lillian Li explores how to include nonwhite characters who are neither arbitrary nor tokens.
Wikipedia List of Literary Awards
This page links to all of the literary awards that currently have Wikipedia page entries, sorted by geographic region, genre, and language. The individual award pages are a useful place to find past winners and contest history, though they may not indicate whether the contest is still active.
Wild Must Be Wild
By Jeanne Blum Lesinski
—after Depression in Winter
by Jane Kenyon
There comes a little space
between the south side of the boulder
and the perennial garden
just right for the rabbit burrow
I found that spring: kittens
the size of Easter eggs almost
ready to wean and run—
or freeze, in hope the hawk is blind.
My daughter scooped one up,
carried it around in her hoodie,
like her own Velveteen Rabbit,
until I told her: wild must be wild.
I prayed there be no traffic
as the kittens scattered ahead of us
across the road to the woods.
I opened my eyes to waving grasses
and sighed.
Wilgefortis Press
Launched in 2016, Wilgefortis Press publishes the Good News Children's Book Series, a line of religious picture books that feature and affirm children and families who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and genderqueer. The press is sponsored by Grace Lutheran Church in San Francisco. Debut titles by Megan Rohrer, pastor at Grace Lutheran and the first openly transgender pastor ordained in the Lutheran church, include Faithful Families (co-authored with Pamela Ryan and Ihnatovich Maryia), which teaches that God loves all types of families, and What to Wear to Church, celebrating diverse gender expressions. Read a profile of the press at Jesus in Love Blog.
William Trevor: The Collected Stories
Small masterpieces of melancholy from acclaimed Irish writer. Like a scalpel, Trevor's prose is delicate yet piercing, exposing unnamed but all-too-familiar psychological truths about his characters and ourselves.
Winning Writers Editor Jendi Reiter Interviewed at Book Marketing Buzz Blog
Book Marketing Buzz Blog editor Brian Feinblum interviewed our editor and VP about the rewards and challenges of being a writer today, and the future of book publishing in the age of social media and e-books. This website is a useful resource for authors seeking to leverage their online presence into book sales and publicity.
Winning Writers War Poetry Contest Winners
This contest sponsored by Winning Writers seeks the best unpublished poems on the theme of war. Poignant, horrifying, uplifting, or darkly humorous, these beautifully written winning poems stand out for their ability to teach us something important about war and the complexity of human nature.
Witcraft
Witcraft is an online journal that publishes "brief, humorous and engaging" flash prose and poetry, 200-1,000 words. They are seeking "wit, word play, absurdity and inspired nonsense," and are not interested in political satire or gross bodily humor. Site is updated weekly, and top three submissions each month receive modest cash prizes.
With Words
With Words is a UK-based nonprofit that offers writing workshops and literary events for adults and youth, as well as an international haiku competition. Visit their website for basic advice on writing haiku poetry, with examples.
With Words
With Words is a UK-based nonprofit that offers writing workshops and literary events for adults and youth, as well as an international haiku competition. Visit their website for basic advice on writing haiku poetry, with examples.
Wocky Jivvy: Poems of Shame
Brave and as yet unsuccessful attempts to write a poem that The National Library of Poetry won't accept. From "Dawn of a New Eve": "Now he offers me dark fruit;/A piece of pie for my bloodroot./Thick serpent slithers through my verse;/Is what he seeks inside my purse?/'Oh Eve, I ssssavor what you wrote!'/Now he's coiled around my throat..."
Woman with Crows
By Ruth Thompson. This poetry collection, earthy yet mythical, celebrates the spiritual wisdom of the Crone, the woman with crows (and crows' feet). Because of her conscious kinship with nature, the speaker of these poems embraces the changes that our artificial culture has taught us to dread. Fatness recurs as a revolutionary symbol of joy: a woman's body is not her enemy, and scarcity is not the deepest truth. For her, the unraveling of memory and the shedding of possessions are not a story of decline but a fairy tale of transformation.
Women’s Review of Books
They are mainly interested in women's studies books, poetry, and literary prose. They also publish author interviews, photography, and original poetry. Women's Review of Books is published by the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, in collaboration with Old City Publishing in Philadelphia, PA.
Wompo - A Women in Poetry Listserv
Wompo is a listserv devoted to the discussion of Women's Poetry. Membership is open to all individuals who are interested in discussing poetry written by women. The discussion covers women poets of all periods, aesthetics, and ethnicities.
Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer
Make your moods work for you, judge if and when to quit your day job, get along with the others in your home and tap the power of positive and negative thinking.
