Part One By WTP Writer Richard Wertime Woven Tale Press writer Richard Wertime reflects on the craft of fiction in an ongoing series of craft notes “I believe that metaphor alone can give a sort of eternity to style.” —Marcel Proust, Chroniques What can metaphor do for us? We should ask, in the same breath,…
Tag: prose
On Aphorisms
From Richard Kostalanetz’s A Writer’s Torah A Selection by DeWitt Henry, WTP Prose Editor Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz’s work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster’s Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature,…
Reflections by Tillie Olsen
“I’ve never had, except once, that happy time when something writes itself…” Transcribed by DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor These reflections were from a recording of Tillie Olsen’s reading at Emerson College, MA, March 23, 1974. I first read Tillie Olsen as part of editing Ploughshares in the 1970s. Sam Lawrence, whom I had contacted as…
The Story Teller and the Telling
“Story is you and me. Story connects us to each other and to the world.” By Ruth Knafo Setton, WTP Guest Writer Every night for the past thousand years, under moon and stars in the Djma el Fnaa, the fabled square of Marrakech, a man tells a story. Wearing a white turban and djellabah, he…
The Minefield and the Soul
Notes on Identity and Literature By David Mason, WTP Guest Writer “The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys to the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.” —Czeslaw Milosz “When I was a…
Featured Bookmarks: The Literary
October 2018 By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor Monthly link highlights to online resources, magazines, and author sites that seem informative and inspiring for working writers. Most are free. Suggestions are welcomed. The Drum: A Literary Magazine For Your Ears An innovative, media-savvy enterprise begun in 2010 by novelist Henriette Power, now Henriette Lazaridis, The Drum beats…
Book Review: The Hidden Machinery
Ore in Every Rift of Livesey’s Apologia and Guide By Dewitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor THE HIDDEN MACHINERY: ESSAYS ON WRITING by Margot Livesey (Tin House Books, 2017). 301pp, paper, $15.95. MFA programs are descendants of the “how to be a successful writer” handbooks in the 1890s (see “Handbooks and Workshops” in Andrew Levy’s 1993…
Book Review: Heating & Cooling
Micro-Memoirs of a Life Lived and Imagined By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor HEATING & COOLING: 52 MICRO-MEMOIRS by Beth Ann Fennelly (W.W. Norton & Co, October 2017) 112pp, $22.95. Beth Ann Fennelly, poet, novelist, letter writer, and writing program administrator, tells a large story with her nuanced collection of “52 micro-memoirs,” some a sentence…
David Gaffney | In His Own Words
[dropcap]D[/dropcap]avid Gaffney comes from Cleator Moor in West Cumbria and now lives in Manchester. The Guardian says that “One-hundred-and-fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.” He is the author of several books of fiction and flash fiction, including Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), Never Never (2008), The Half-Life of…
Six Rules of Grammar Fiction Writers Can Challenge
By Tamsin de la Harpe 1. Sentence Fragments. Look, fiction writers use sentence fragments. Most of you should know this by now, because you read books and if they’re halfway decent books you’ll see sentence fragments. Like this. Assuming, however, that your high school English teacher broke this habit out of you, along with the…