“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Tag Archives: writing
Quotidian: Virginia Woolf
Quotidian: Writers and Empathy
“Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”– American activist, writer, educator and commentator, Nikki Giovanni
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How to Find Literary Open Submission Periods and Calls for Poetry, Art, Fiction Submissions
(image via Ninth Letter)
1. Keep endless lists of literary journals. Mark which ones actually publish your style, and archive the rest. Note open submission periods per year.
2. Follow LitMagNews on Twitter, where Jonathan Crowl posts and retweets calls for submissions from literary journals.
3. Join the Facebook Group for Poetry, Fiction, and Art Calls for Submissions. It’s approve-only but it’s fairly easy to get approved.
Submit!!
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Separate Beds: Short Fiction
If all short stories had the fierce, ferocious immediacy of Jahla Seppanen’s, I’d read a lot more short stories.
“I don’t miss her as I thought I would. Sure, at night, but what’s night without some loneliness. Even when we were married I would wake up, her on the far side of the bed and me on the other, and I would feel lonely although she was close. My parents slept in separate beds. They said it helped parry feelings of being unwanted. When they kissed in the morning over coffee and eggs, it was a real kiss. Not an afterthought to the seven o’clock alarm. Not a simple recognition of the other’s being. A real kiss.
The separation began when I suggested spending a month in Morocco.”
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Let’s Rainbow Rowell It Up in Here
Rainbow Rowell is one of my favorite authors, and indisputably one of the best young adult novelists out there. So have two bits of deliciousness today.
First, Buzzfeed did a great interview of her, from Ashley Ford who goes by smashfizzle on Tumblr –
“The first time Rowell wrote about the struggles of her childhood was in her column for the Omaha World Herald. Her voice lowers a bit, serious but without shame. “I was living in rural areas often without power or a phone or a car. Our water came from a well and a pump. My dad was not around and when he was around, he was not good. There was a lot of alcohol abuse and drug abuse. I feel like I need to say that I’m probably sane and alive because I had a really great mom. Eventually, when we moved to the city and we were on welfare, it was a step up. Being poor in the city was easier than being poor in the country.”
Despite their living conditions, Rowell remembers a home where her father read her The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Books were her safe haven. “My mother was very strict, there was very little on television that we were allowed to watch, there were very few movies that we were allowed to watch. But she’d let me read anything.”
And a favorite Youtube book reviewer Polesandbananas covered Landline with her usual pizzazz –
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Quotidian: Typewriter Keys
“Set the foot down with distrust on the crust of the world — it is thin” – Edna St. Vincent Millay
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Pretty for Your Pocket: Mini Notebooks
These whimsical pocket notebook from Rifle Paper Company are utterly floating my boat – aren’t they both gorgeous and functional? They’d be a great supplement/substitute for Moleskin. Fuel the creative life, kids.
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Illustration Love: Vintage Typewriter
He wrote a great deal, mostly because he liked the smell of ink from the pages rolling out of the typewriter.
Illustration by Holly Exley
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Caffeinated Links: Food Revolution Bound by Income, Freelance Advice, The Cutting Edge Snark
It’s been far too long since I did one of these.
You guys, I love The Cutting Edge. It’s adorable and weird and cheesy and adorable. It’s really not bad. But Pajiba’s Courtney Enlow is HILARIOUS reviewing it. You want to read this. RT Pajiba
This is important for you us creative types. Contently’s Freelancer Playbook for Scoring Press Passes. RT
Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half has a great interview out. “That part that is selfish and weird and greedy is part of me, and that’s always going to be a part of me, no matter how much I try to cover it up. It’s like watching my dogs misbehave, it’s like, “Oh you, you’re doing that again.” RT Hairpin
Great Guernica article on the geographical nature of food perspectives. “That, I think, is what is lost in this whole national discussion about food. Because it’s led by people who don’t have to worry. It’s not that people aren’t aware of that, but it’s totally different to really understand it—and to craft messages and strategies that account for it… You’re sitting with people, and they’re really poor, and their lives, because they are poor, are very chaotic. Somebody’s brother is in jail, somebody is on drugs, somebody is working the night shift at the gas station, the kid has ADHD. And you’re sitting there going, “Have you thought about whole grains?” It sounds, to them, like somebody saying, “Oh, my private jet broke down.” RT Guernica
You’ve probably already seen this. If not, you need to. Star Wars trailer, Guardians of the Galaxy style.
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You realize you had actually missed crying, like you’d miss the rain if it never fell anymore
Delicious very short piece by Kathleen Brewin Lewis over at Treehouse Magazine –
“Because you think your poetry has become too full of clear skies and morning birdsong, you begin breaking your pills in half. There’s a little line in the middle of the peachy, oval medication you take each day indicating it is designed to be divided. The act makes a small but satisfying popping sound. Now you take only half of a pill per diem.
After a couple of days, a little fog rolls in, but just around the periphery. You can feel your bruises again, can finger the bumpy ridges on your scars—old friends. You’re back to arranging your words in a beat-up notebook in random coffee shops, and what you write about has an edge. Not a black hole, just an edge. You can still be chirpy with your friends and family, like they like you to be, which is why you keep taking half a pill.”
Coffee and Irony 