Call for Submissions: The Litragger

Are you looking for a place to re-publish works that have already appeared in print?  The Litragger is the place!  Check out their submission guidelines below:

 

Dear Writers,

We are republishing work that has previously appeared in print, exists in back issues, but does not have an online presence. We believe firmly in the benefit of publishing in print. But we also believe that writers deserve the opportunity to place their work online in a well-designed reading environment, following the print publication cycle, so that they may find new readers and build an audience on the web.

So if you have a piece, send it to us!

Email a word document or PDF to submissions@litragger.com.

Just let us know where it appeared originally and when it was published, and we’ll read it and let you know if we think it’s a good fit.

– Adam and Landon

 

Reading for Writers: Dino Campana’s “The Night”

 

There were a lot of interesting things happening in Dino Campana’s essay “The Night.” There were some incredible metaphors and exquisite language which made me wonder about the expectations that we usually have for nonfiction in terms of style and language. Another stylistic component of note is that Campana does not use any names to refer to the characters in this essay. Instead, the only names that he uses are those of famous artists and writers. Campana also has a really arresting way of changing the pronouns that he uses for the characters, including himself, in his work. The effect of this is jarring but also captivating.

The first thing I noticed about this essay was the language being used. It is incredibly poetic and lyrical. There are a number of really striking metaphors, for example, “broken hovels like old bruises, dead windows.” Or, even more gripping: “the white Mediterranean night joked with the huge shapes of the women while the flame’s bizarre death-attempts went on and on in the streetlamp’s cave.” Language like this, though interesting and beautiful may be jarring for a reader who is looking for a straightforward account of Campana’s escapades. It made me think about the expectations that readers bring to nonfiction and whether essays have an obligation to live up to these expectation. Is it factually true that the night was joking (Or, put another way, can that be fact checked?)? How does metaphor come into play in essays? Or, more directly, what is the place of metaphor and lyrical, poetic language in nonfiction? If the reader is coming to the piece looking for truth and accuracy, how far can the writer go with metaphors and poetic language? In general, I think that if it is clear that the writer is using metaphor and clear what the writer is intending to express, this kind of language can greatly enhance creative nonfiction pieces. However, in this piece the metaphors were so dense and thick that it may have obscured some of the reader’s understanding of the truths behind the language. It made me question whether that was intentional. Perhaps Campana’s experience was so dreamlike that he wanted to convey that to the reader. Or maybe he did not want his reader to have a clear sense of what was going on. Perhaps he wanted his reader to experience the feel of the situation more than the events surrounding it. Is this authorial prerogative?

The esoteric, dreamlike quality of this narrative is pushed further by Campana’s refusal to use the names of characters populating his essay. It’s interesting that he doesn’t ever refer to anyone in the narrative by their name, only by their physical description. This can make it difficult for the reader to follow at times, but it also is especially interesting given the subject matter. Perhaps Campana did not know the name of anyone with whom he interacted that night. This is made even more peculiar by the constant name-dropping that he does with famous writers and artists. The lack of character names in the essay is even more stark next to the names of Faust, Dante, Leonardo, and Michelangelo and the names of saints. It’s as if he is drawing the distinction between these exalted, nameable people and the people in his narrative.

In addition to not giving his characters names, he also switches the pronoun that he uses to refer to them. In one section of the essay, he refers to the amber-bodied girl as “she” and later he seems to be addressing her as”you.” The most striking instance in which he does this is when he goes from using a first-person perspective of his experience to speaking about himself in the third person briefly. He refers to “the person I had once been” as “he” for two sections. This gives an interesting effect of distancing himself from the events of the night, making it his former self and not him who had these experiences. However, he only can keep this distance for a short time before going back to “I” and owning the experiences again.

All of these things made this essay difficult to decipher, as if the reader were decoding the text instead of reading it. The use of metaphors and lyrical language obscured some of the concreteness of the experiences that he was ruminating on.   The failure to use names of characters often made who he was actually talking about ambiguous. Even his pronouns when talking about these people (including himself!) were not consistent. The combination of these things gave the essay a dreamlike, nearly impenetrable quality. However, for me personally, these things added an interesting depth and dimension to the essay as well as giving a peak into the possible obfuscation that Campana was attempting. It made me ask a lot of questions, mostly unresolved, but also very interesting.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices.

Reading for Writers: Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays by Joan Didion, all based on the theme of things coming undone. She looks at this theme from a variety of angles, both personally reflective and also commenting on society at large. In this collection, Didion makes very interesting use of narrative structure when retelling events, adding to the feeling that “the center cannot hold” (xi).

Didion begins her book with the famous poem by Yeats in which he examines things coming undone. She also titles her book after the last line of this poem, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” In her Preface, which is quite strange, Didion explains her collection. In rather defeatist, pessimistic terms, she presents us her work. She says that it is representative of her coming to terms with “the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart” (xiii). Throughout the book, the reader can feel this sense of crumbling and a loss of groundedness or centeredness. We see it in the way that her rock-like ideal of John Wayne falls apart with cancer and the way that she struggles with ethics in “On Morality.” Didion wrestles with ideas of a world coming undone, both the larger society and on a more personal, individual level.

However, this effect is most interesting when it comes out in the structure of her writing. This is apparent from her very first essay. In “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” Didion does, in fact begin at the beginning of the story. “This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country” (3). However, after a bit of background about the place and the history of the place, the linearity of the essay begins to fall apart. Like the falconer losing hold of the falcon, the essay almost seems to get away from Didion. She jumps from the background of the land to the death of the husband, to the funeral. She starts a new section with the birth of Lucille Miller through to her unhappy marriage and then brings her lens in close on the day in question before recounting Lucille’s arrest, jumping back to the night of the accident and then to the building of the case. The next section recounts her affair starting with a generalization and jumping straight to the end, before explaining more. Then Didion recounts a litany of events that happened the same day as the Miller trial began before recounting the trial and bringing us up to the present day at the time of writing. In this present day, she focuses in on the house left behind, the child of Lucille, and the inmates that Lucille is surrounded by instead of focusing in on the main character of the essay itself. The essay then returns to the past, ending at Arthwell Hayton’s second marriage. This jumping and twisting of time, structure and focus mirrors Didion’s words of things falling apart. Not only is the time not linear, but the lens of the narration moves too, sometimes focused on Lucille, sometimes the place, sometimes those whose lives mirror hers, such as her fellow inmates, others in the news the same day, or Arthwell Hayton’s new wife. This poignantly gives the reader the effect that the center, cannot, in fact hold. We can feel the way that Lucille must feel, that her world is unravelling, and also the way that those watching the story must feel: what is becoming of our society?

This is most powerfully shown in her essay after which the collection is named. In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion gives us a picture of San Francisco in the 1960s. However, she does not explain it to use as much as she makes a pastiche of vignettes to give us a picture of the chaos and disorder of that place and time. She tells us from the get-go what she is getting at: “The center was not holding” (84). She tells us what is missing and how the reality is not meeting expectations. She gives us an array of sources to show us the disparate voices: a sign trying to find a missing person (almost perversely in verse), communiques from Chester Anderson, song lyrics, an excerpt from a newspaper, questions asked to her by other people, fliers. The weaves these throughout vignettes of stories of people she’s met in her time in the Bay Area. Even when telling the stories of these people, she jumps: from Deadeye to Max to little girls to runaways to Debbie to Officer Gerrans, back to Max. And that is just the first quarter of the essay. It’s not even clear that the vignettes are arranged chronologically. This cut-and-paste of the stories she experiences in San Francisco serve to further the feeling that things are coming apart: people are not acting as they should, time is not moving as it should, the narrator is not recounting as she should. Instead, the people are out of control, time is set spinning, and the narrator’s hold on the gyre is slipping.

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices. May contain affiliate links.

 

 

Books for Writers: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Essay Writing Tips from Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem
How to Structure Nonfiction: Lessons from Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Joan Didion's collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This is a book every writer should read.

Learn how to write narrative nonfiction. In this book, we can find useful advice for writers about how to structure personal essays. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing.

#inspiration #mustread #writing #memoir #nonfiction #essay #books
Books for Writers: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Essay Writing Tips from Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem
How to Structure Nonfiction: Lessons from Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Joan Didion's collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This is a book every writer should read.

Learn how to write narrative nonfiction. In this book, we can find useful advice for writers about how to structure personal essays. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing.

#inspiration #mustread #writing #memoir #nonfiction #essay #books
Books for Writers: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Essay Writing Tips from Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem
How to Structure Nonfiction: Lessons from Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Joan Didion's collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This is a book every writer should read.

Learn how to write narrative nonfiction. In this book, we can find useful advice for writers about how to structure personal essays. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing.

#inspiration #mustread #writing #memoir #nonfiction #essay #books

Sharing: Suburban Ecology I by TheCartographe

I found this amazing bit of writing the other day on TheCartographe and just needed to share it with you!  As a lover of place and environment and the way that spaces effect us, I adore what’s happening on this blog: “TheCartographe is about the curation of the environment: the selection of images, texts, and ideas that is the formation of a landscape. Topography is physical, but landscape is always psychic.”

This blog is not to be missed. Enjoy!

 

Suburban Ecology I

July 9, 2014.

 

Some millennia before the present, when the sea was in places it currently is not, it might have been that Anne Barton’s yard was a natural beach of smooth-hewn stones — perfect and round, themselves looking for all the world like fat droplets of water thrown up and clinging on the grassy shore.  The blue velvet easy chair stood primly on the rocks, taking the sea air like one who — feinting — is afraid of the ocean.  But Anne’s yard was not really a beach, of course, and the chair moreover took no solace from the pretend game of seaside release and introspection.  It did not appreciate the scene before it: the crisp break of sidewalk and swell of asphalt.  It was aware only of the thing it could not see — the blockish, secluded bungalow beyond the beachhead, where in the downstairs sitting room there was a precisely chair-shaped depression in a blanched shag carpet the colour of a watermelon where the meat comes to the rind.

I was in this house once, seven or eight years ago, when for one or another reason I  was collecting a size-adjustable mannequin from the Vietnam-era parlor upstairs, located at one end of a hallway encased exclusively by mirrors which, when shoved with some force, would open to reveal narrow closets stuffed with outerwear, shoes, and unlabelled boxes.  The front door, up a half-flight of steps from the lawn and partly concealed by an globular rhododendron, opened onto this hallway, and pointed inside toward the kitchen at the house’s rear.  There, I remember, Ms. Barton, an elderly woman who — to me — has never visibly aged, remained sitting at a card table while she asked me, standing against the entrance to the hall, if I would consider volunteering for her Sunday School.  I can’t recall answering the question.  Instead, I remember leafing through the records — none of which I recognized — contained in a cardboard box which sat on a brass-framed, stackable chair in the parlor, across the way from the kitchen.  I waited until Anne’s granddaughter, my associate, reappeared with a small plastic container filled with a multitude of compartments for pins, all heads different colours, and we departed with the rattling mannequin in parts under our free arms.

At that time, Anne’s garden was not half-covered in rocks.  In fact, it was a serene, if somewhat weedy glade, set apart from the street by the low boughs of a blue-needled pine tree which I did not recognize and now assume was originally decorative.  I lived — still live — in the house beside Anne’s; somewhat newer, somewhat more modish, my father would exasperatedly but quietly rake pinecones and long, browned needles off our lawn from September to Christmas.  At that time, Anne’s glade had real seating: a chipped, white wooden loveseat over-thrown by a modified trellis, and an elaborate swing — also wood — which reminded me always of my brother’s books on medieval implements of war.

It was one summer when I returned from university that the pine tree had been felled — its little ecosystem of sputtering grass and shed needles replaced by a neatly edged bed of lava rock.  Two ceramic pots had been placed off-centre on the wide stump, and in them the plastic-coated cardboard tags that identify greenhouse plants sprouted up like tombstones behind small, flowering stalks.  It was just last summer when the first five metres of Anne’s lawn had been dug up and replaced with the round stones.  At the same time, things began appearing on her driveway.  First the loveseat and swing, which soon disappeared, and then boxes of clothes, which would likewise appear in the morning and have vanished upon my return home in the afternoon.  Then, a tarpaulin tent appeared over a metal pole frame in the middle of the driveway, and a 1995 red Ford mustang would regularly pull in and out of it, as if on the tide.  This largely concealed the garage door, which remained closed during all this time.  I did not see Anne, though my father told me she continued to live there, and the cars that came and went (I noticed only the red convertible) were the vehicles of family and friends — or of the tenants downstairs who had moved in to the bungalow’s expansive basement.

The chair knew very little of this, being limited to the influence of the downstairs tenants and its sidelong views of sporadic children’s play in the tenants’ backyard daycare, a business Anne surely appreciated because of her attachment to children and their ideal upbringing.  When it was removed, I think, its first logical concern must have been the expected weather, and secondly the simple sign hung across its back — “FREE” — which would surely give anyone’s self-esteem a miserable pummeling.  It was, I doubt, hardly troubled by the premise that in millennia to come, it could be considered a distracting embellishment on the ecology of the house — a throwaway decoration not unlike the faking of a shoreline in a time of changing seas.

-tC

Call for Submissions: Saw Palm Magazine

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES


Saw Palm is a Florida-themed journal, however we welcome writers and artists from across the country and the globe as long as the work is connected to Florida (via images, people, themes, et cetera). We also welcome creative works from Floridians that are not obviously about someplace else. Please check out past issues, available for download as free PDFs. We publish one issue per year in the spring.

We do not accept work that has been previously published either online or in print. We welcome simultaneous submissions as long as you immediately notify us of acceptance elsewhere. Our general reading period is between July 1st and October 1st, however submissions for Places to Stand in Florida are accepted year-round.

Send only one submission per genre at a time. If you have a pending submission, please wait for a response before submitting again. We make every effort to respond as quickly as possible while giving each submission the time it deserves. Our average response time for is 3-5 months. After 6 months, you’re welcome to follow up with the appropriate editor.

All submissions must be made electronically through our online submissions manager. Please upload prose and poetry files in .doc or .docx formats only. Art, photography, and comics should be uploaded in .jpeg / .jpg format only. Paper submissions sent via snail mail will be recycled unread.

Click here to submit.


POETRY

We accept up to five poems per submission period at a maximum of 10 pages. Combine all poems into one document and include in a single submission.

FICTION

We ask that fiction submissions be no longer than 6000 words. Please send only one story per reading period.

CREATIVE NONFICTION

We ask that submissions of memoir and essays be no longer than 6000 words. Please send only one piece per reading period.

FLASH FICTION & FLASH NONFICTION

We accept up to three works of flash fiction or flash nonfiction (750 words or less) per submission period. Please send all stories or essays in one document.

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

We accept up to five submissions of art or photography per reading period. Please send files in .jpeg / .jpg format only. You may also include a URL if a portfolio of your work is online.

COMICS

We welcome submissions of graphic fiction and nonfiction of up to seven pages, whether in black & white, greyscale, or full color. Submit in .jpeg / .jpg format only. Keep in mind that the journal’s dimensions are smaller (5″x7″) than the average literary journal and so comics with small panels filled with intricate art are not well-suited.

INTERVIEWS

We are especially interested in interviews of Florida writers and artists, although we’re open to almost any Florida-related subject. Please query us about the interview subject first, via email.

REVIEWS

We are interested in reviews of any Florida-related subject: author, book, film, tourist attraction, CD, website, beach, park, toll roads, snack stands, local landmarks—anything! These reviews will appear on www.sawpalm.org. Unlike submissions of creative work, current or recent USF students and faculty are welcome to submit reviews. Size limit: 6000 words. Reviews appear on sawpalm.org.

PLACES TO STAND

Please tell us what it’s like to stand at a specific place in Florida at a specific time of day in 500 words or less. While we enjoy the unusual, locations should be public and accessible (so not your bathroom!) Please include GPS coordinates.

Unlike other categories, current or recent USF students and faculty are welcome to submit pieces for the Places to Stand series.

Poems submitted as part of the Places to Stand series are welcome but should be justified left and otherwise not have complex formatting and spacing. This is due to technical limitations in Google Earth.

Places to Stand appears on sawpalm.org.

Reading for Writers: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot takes us on the incredibly interesting and moving journey of her attempt to understand the issues surrounding the life of Henrietta Lacks, her family, and the science and politics of HeLa cells.  She weaves these things together to give a more captivating, more complete picture of each of them.  The structure of the book is one that makes the stories that Skloot tells much more intriguing. It may seem that a book about history, science, and social issues could be dry and unexciting, informative but a chore to trudge through.  Instead, Skloot gives the reader a page-turner, a book that is difficult to put down.  She does this by doing two very effective things.  One has to do with the way she structures the book.  She weaves the history, science, and politics together so that you are never reading any one of those things for long enough to get bored.  The other thing that she does incredibly effectively is personalize the history and science.  Not only does she make the story of Henrietta Lacks and her family personal, but she also tells the personal stories of  the doctors, scientists, and others involved in the history that she describes.

The structure that Rebecca Skloot uses in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is very interesting.  One might think that she would tell a story like this chronologically or by subject.  It is, after all, about science and history and a family past.  She could have chosen to divide it into parts dealing with each of those subjects.  She also could have chosen to structure the book chronologically.  But she doesn’t do that either. Instead, she intertwines the chronology and the subjects.  She begins and ends the book in the present time that she is writing.  The prologue starts with a photograph that is on her wall and then moves back to Skloot’s college years.  It then jumps to the voice of Deborah, Henrietta’s daughter, during the time that Skloot was researching and writing the book. From this prologue, we move quickly to  1951, when Henrietta became ill.  From the very beginning of the book, we know that we are not going to read a straight-forward chronology or a book about just the science or history involved in culture cells.  Skloot explores times as far back as the antebellum South.  The book ends with a “Where They Are Now” chapter and closes with an Afterword that discusses the current state of ethical issues surrounding culture cell research, even extending a bit into the future possibilities of how to deal with these difficult questions.  The way that Skloot weaves these things together not only keeps the reader interested, but also shows the ways in which the personal lives, medical science, and history are all intertwined.  Though this skipping around and intertwining could be confusing, Skloot does a good job of keeping things clear. At the start of each chapter, she has a timeline to show the dates that she is writing about.  In the back of the book, she gives a timeline and a cast of characters to make sure that her reader can always be on the same page as the story.

Skloot does something else that is unexpected in a nonfiction book about medical science.  She make each facet that she talks about highly personal.  As we can see from the way she starts the book, with her own personal experience, Deborah’s personal words, and a retelling of Henrietta’s personal experience, this is not going to be a book about impersonal facts.  Skloot doesn’t just tell her own personal story or the story of the Lacks family, however.  She extends this mode of storytelling into the personal stories surrounding the doctors, scientists, and many of the people involved in the ethical debates.  This helps to draw the reader in to the story and the issues surrounding the story.  Instead of a cold, clinical account of scientific discoveries and ethical debates, Skloot gives us the stories of the people behind the debates.  Not only that, she also extends this to telling her readers about her research.  Instead of only giving her findings and what she dug up regarding her research, she allows her readers to see how she did her research and the personal interactions that she has with people as she delves further and further into the story of Henrietta Lacks and her cells.  She gives backgrounds and descriptions of people that she meets and conversations that she has.  All of this adds life and dimension to the science and history that Skloot is exploring, making it more interesting and pulling the reader deeper into the story.  Because of this, the doctors and scientists, Lacks family members and people that Skloot meets while doing research become not just historical figures, but characters in a rich story that becomes The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.

 

 

Books for Writers: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Science Writing Tips from Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 
How to Write Compelling Nonfiction: Lessons from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Rebecca Skloot’s nonfiction book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A book every writer should read!

Learn how to write compelling nonfiction and get useful advice for writers about how to structure nonfiction about science and history. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing.

#mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #sciencewriting #tbr
Books for Writers: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Science Writing Tips from Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 
How to Write Compelling Nonfiction: Lessons from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Rebecca Skloot’s nonfiction book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A book every writer should read!

Learn how to write compelling nonfiction and get useful advice for writers about how to structure nonfiction about science and history. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing.

#mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #sciencewriting #tbr
Books for Writers: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Science Writing Tips from Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 
How to Write Compelling Nonfiction: Lessons from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Rebecca Skloot’s nonfiction book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A book every writer should read!

Learn how to write compelling nonfiction and get useful advice for writers about how to structure nonfiction about science and history. These writing techniques can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing.

#mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #sciencewriting #tbr

Inspiration: Writing that Escapes the Page

The Materiality of Meaning: the Format of Words on the Page

            It has long been the realm of poets to think about line breaks and format on the page.  There is a myth that for prose, the words should speak for themselves.  We have the idea that prose writers who manipulate how they put their words on the page somehow undermine the meaning of the words, as if calling attention to the fact that they are on a page takes away their power.  When poets think about the way they format their work on the page, they are being artful, purposeful, but when prose writers do it, it is a gimmick, a trick.  It’s as if readers of prose are meant to mind meld directly with the words.  We imagine that the way the prose is experienced does not matter.  This is not the case.  Whether we are reading words in straight lines on a page, in text boxes, with line breaks, wrapped around images, on an ebook reader or online, our physical experience of the words matter.  It is not true that we feel the words as completely separate from the physical medium through which they are presented to us.  Because of this, we, as writers, must be more cognizant of the ways in which we are offering our narratives.

            We are living in a time when the possible modes for storytelling are more numerous than ever before.  It used to be that recitation, handwritten manuscripts, and books off a printing press were the only media available to writers to disseminate their works.  The forms that these works took followed the physical limitations of these media.  Works meant to be recited were written with meter and rhyme, so as to be as easy as possible to remember.  Books from a printing press used uniform fonts and lines to conform to the constraints of the machine.  Straying from this form was expensive and difficult.  Even adding images or color consumed near impossible time and money.

            With the advent of the digital age, however, the possibilities for publishing and storytelling have exploded.  This explosion means there is also a myriad of ways that a reader can experience a text.  Audio books, Prezis, digital storytelling, hypertexts, and ebooks all offer new possibilities for narratives to be presented.  Because of these new technologies, we can see the fallacy of the direct experience of the word.  A book put in each of these formats takes on new meaning and affords the reader altered ways to encounter the text, even as the words stay the same.   It becomes apparent, then, that reading is an experience that is dictated, at least in part, by the physical choices that authors make concerning format and medium.  In this way, we can see the importance of the material medium that a writer chooses.  The writer can now be a painter, a sculptor, and a poet all in the same work.

            Even if our work remains in traditional ink and paper form, the options in terms of choices a writer can enact are plentiful.  We are no longer beholden to the constraints of traditional printing presses, but can now digitally format our words to be printed in a diverse array of forms.  Writers can choose varying fonts and font sizes.  We can include images or sculpt the ways our words look on the page.   We can choose the way that different ideas get juxtaposed or separated.  We can change color, font or style midsentence, or even midword.  Rather than being automatically a gimmick, these devices can be used to add a more dimension and new layers of meaning to texts.

            Take, for example, Kamau Brathwaite’s essay “Trench Town Rock.”  In his introduction, to the essay, John D’Agata writes:

 I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a ‘performative essay,’ but I know that there are texts that are more profound because of the arguments they try to demonstrate rather than merely state … that simultaneously enact the concepts they represent… Brathwaite therefore emphasizes the experience of reading his texts, encouraging us to find alternative paths into their meanings: visually, aurally, authentically participatory (D’Agata, 599).

 Brathwaite uses an array of devices in his essay to make the reading more experiential.  He uses images, changes the sizes and fonts of his texts, uses varying margins, italics, and bold type.  It is clear that he was purposeful in his choices.  The some sections of the essay are scattered and disjointed, while others read like traditional poems, news reports, or transcripts. The format of each of these sections visibly shows the differences. The effects of these choices on the reader are palpable.   Instead of reading an account of the deaths, the reader can feel the chaotic, disjointed feeling that being in Jamaica at the time must have been.  The reader’s sense of the order of things is disrupted, leaving her with the feeling of lawlessness and turmoil that mirrored Brathwaite’s Jamaica. In this way, the reader experiences the feelings more directly than words following a traditional format would have allowed.

            The ways that a reader encounters words on a page will change the experience of those words.  Different fonts can be used to show different voices.  The words telling the story of a journey can show the journey in addition to telling it, following the route along the page.  Two versions of similar stories can be juxtaposed to show the differences in perspectives.  Different colors or fonts could be used to give the reader different feelings.  Text that is askew on the page can be used to literally show a skewed point of view.   Rather than being interesting effects and ways to play with words or experiment, current technologies make it possible for these new layers of meaning to be the norm.

            It is indeed true that form follows function.  Thus far, writing has taken a very specific form, following the function of the technologies available to us.  But is it true that linear, left-to-right, uniform font on sequential pages should be the default form in which narratives are experienced?  In a postmodern world, where texts are becoming ever more disjointed, we must ask the question if it serves the purposes of the individual text to be written in a linear manner.  It may be true that this form is useful and logical for narratives that follow a traditional linear structure.  However, for works that do not follow this narrative structure, the form of linear font on sequential pages does not follow the function.  As the technology to shape the experience of the reader becomes more and more accessible, writers have more of an obligation to take these possibilities into account when making decisions about their work.  It should not be assumed that all, or even most works are best suited for traditional formats.  Not all narratives or experiences or essays follow traditional, linear structures, and their formats should adapt to the experience.  Now that we are released from the technological constraints of traditional printing, writers need to let go of the constraints in format that came along with that.

              It is not the case, of course, that all writing from here on out should be in non-traditional formats.  Rather, writers should make conscious decisions about how their work looks on the page and take into consideration the effects of those decisions on the reader. We should let go of the myth of the spiritual, non physical power of our words and understand that they are experienced through the choices we make about format and medium.  More and more, the decisions about such things fall into the hands of writers.  Rather than buying into the idea that the power and meaning of our words lies only in putting one letter after another, we should allow ourselves to utilize the full potential available to us by making thoughtful, conscious decisions not only about the words we chose, but also how we chose to send those words out into the world.

Work Cited

Brathwaite, Kamau. “Trench Town Rock.” The Lost Origins of the Essay. Ed. John D’Agata. St.Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2009. Print.

Call for Submissions: New Orleans Review

The good people over at the New Orleans Review are now accepting submissions. See below for details.

 

Submit

PRINT ISSUE

Fiction
For our next print issue, we are looking for “long” short stories or even “short” novellas. Send pieces up to 12,000 words. No previously published work. Simultaneous submissions are okay.

Nonfiction
For our next print issue, we are looking for longer-form nonfiction pieces (essay, memoir, experimental). Send pieces up to 12,000 words. No previously published work. Simultaneous submissions are okay.

Poetry
For our next print issue, we are looking for a set or series of poems totaling 16-32 pages. No previously published work. Simultaneous submissions are okay.

WEB FEATURES

Fiction
Submit fiction pieces up to 2,500 words. Flash fiction welcome. No previously published work (online or in print). Simultaneous submissions are okay.

Nonfiction
Submit nonfiction pieces up to 2,500 words. Flash nonfiction welcome. No previously published work (online or in print). Simultaneous submissions are okay.

Poetry
Submit up to five pages of poems. No previously published work (online or in print). Simultaneous submissions are okay.

Book Reviews
We are looking for reviews of books (all genres) forthcoming or published in the last year. We are also interested in reviews of books that have been largely neglected (often publications from small/independent presses) in the past 5, 10, 15, or even 20 years. Reviews should be between 500 and 1500 words. We publish book reviews online and prefer to keep them anonymous.

Interviews
Query us (noreview at loyno dot edu) if you’d like to submit or propose an interview.

 CLICK HERE TO ACCESS OUR SUBMISSIONS SYSTEM

NOTE

We use an online submission system exclusively. This system reduces our carbon footprint, decreases our response time, and makes tracking submissions for you and for us most accurate and efficient. Submissions require a $3 fee (except for book reviews): $1 is split between the credit card company and the submissions manager service; and, $2 goes toward New Orleans Review, helping us to publish both online and in print.

PAYMENT

For print issues, contributors receive two copies of the issue in which their work appears.

Using Poetry in Creative Nonfiction: Eva Saulitis’ into great silence

“Alaska. As a college student, a dream for me of blue-white tundra, wolves, caribou, moose, indigenous hunters: wilderness. A dream of emptiness, silence” (3).  With this first line in her first chapter of Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas, Eva Saulitis presents her reader with an idealized, poetic view of the place she is about to bring us.  With these images and sentence fragments, she paints us a lyrical picture of the place we will come to know and study through her.  Though she writes about scientific research and the imminent extinction of a group of transient killer whales, Saulitis uses poetry and poetic language throughout her account to allow her reader to feel her connection to Prince William Sound and to experience that same level of connection and loss.

Throughout into great silence, Saulitis weaves poetry and lyrical language throughout the text.  She begins her book with an epigraph of poetry by Dylan Thomas.  She also begins her prologue with lines of poetry by W.S. Merwin.  With these two epigraphs, Saulitis sets the stage for a book about science which the reader knows will not be a typical research book.  Though into great silence recounts her days as a field biologist studying whales and includes much of her research, she chooses to begin her book and her prologue with poetry.  This shows her reader that she will be narrating this story not only through the lens of a scientist, but also through the lens of a poet.

Saulitis continues to use epigraphs to insert poetry into her narrative throughout the book.  In particular, she uses the epigraphs to frame points of especially poignant emotion. For example, she begins Chapter 18, “Beast and Beauty,” with two lines of poetry by Cyrus Cassells.  This is a small cue to the reader that this chapter will be one of the most evocative in the book.  In this chapter, Eva slowly realizes the true effects of the Valdez oil spill.  As she says, “Every zooming skiff, every blackened beach, every harassment of whales triggered ire, until it seemed the oil was inside me” (92).  She goes on to compare the scene to a “war zone” (92).  This realization that some of the worst fears of the researchers are becoming reality is one of the most emotional moments in the book and Saulitis uses Cassells’ poetry to highlight that.

Saulitis uses a poetic epigraph again to begin the last section of the book, titled, like the book itself, “Into Great Silence.”  On page 179, Saulitis begins Part 4 of her book with a poetic quote from Li-Young Lee.  This section of the book is by far the most emotional.  Saulitis begins to leave her day-to-day accounts of research behind and allows herself to ruminate on the emotions and repercussions connected to the loss that she is witnessing and the grief that she is feeling.  She becomes more introspective and more speculative, trading in scientific research for meditations on death, loss, and ultimately hope.

Saulitis also chooses to begin her second to last chapter with poetry by Peggy Shumaker.  In this chapter, Chapter 47, Saulitis begins to write in present tense.  This is a chapter in which she uses some of the most introspective, reflective language.  It is in this chapter that she revisits her battle with cancer and relates it back to the story of the whales.  She reflects on the process of writing the book.  At the very end of the chapter we see Saulitis as the author who began the book  meeting herself as present author directly and telling us how her views have changed.  Not only does she begin the chapter with poetry, she rewrites the poetry as the title of the chapter.  The poem that she uses ends with the line, “In a language lost to us/god is singing” (239).  She chooses to name this chapter “In a Language Lost to Us, Eyak Is Singing.”  These poetic devices set her reader up for a very poignant ending.

Saulitis does not only use the poetry of others in her account of her whale research and the loss of the pod.  She also brings her own poetry into the retelling.  This happens most often in Saulitis’ use of letters to her parents and her own journal entries from the time.  These things give the reader a penetrating look into the narrator’s relationship with the world around her.  Her letters are often strikingly evocative.  Saulitis makes a real effort to pull those around her into her world.  For example, in her letter to her parents, she writes, “The hemlocks, gray-barked and bearded with lichen, remind me of ancient men in Tai Chi poses.  Gnarled, wind-scoured, half alive, they seem to hold each cry, each gasp of the Sound under oil, under boats, under trash, under storms, like memory given form.  When I lean my body against one, I’m dizzy from their knowledge” (80).  This kind of lyrical language does not just describe the place to the reader, but makes the reader also feel the connection and emotion attached to this place as if we are there with Saulitis and feeling the same sense of connection and attachment.

The emotion and passion with which she writes to her parents also comes through in her journal entries.  Amid a myriad of observations about wildlife, one journal entry muses, “If I sat here all day, what would fill these pages?  Out of nowhere, a helicopter.  Clouds sink and rise, wind rises and stills, the air becomes moister and cooler.  It’s impossible to predict what will happen next” (135).  This kind of imagery and introspection is incredibly effective.  It is clear in both her journal and in many of her correspondences that she is of that place.  There’s an immediacy about those passages that brings the reader into the experience.  In these instances, the reader can feel the place and Saulitis’ connection to it in a very powerful way.  Additionally, the speculation that she engages in here allows the reader to feel the possibility that the place holds.

This kind of lyrical language is juxtaposed with more straightforward accounts of her scientific studies.  She gives not only detached scientific explanations, but also an emotional sense of loss.  This juxtaposition comes to bear on both the factual portions and the poetic portions of Saulitis’ writing.  The lyrical portions are given a sense of authority when they are seen next to the research of a scientist who has been studying the place and the whales for years.  The scientific portions are made much more poignant and the reader connects with them much more when they are placed alongside poetic accounts.  Saulitis gives us not only facts on a page, but these facts are given meaning and weight through her use of poetry and poetic language.  Rather than undermining the validity of the scientific research that Saulitis did, it intensifies it.  The poetry and the science both become more authentic and more true.

Saulitis becomes most lyrical and introspective at the very end of her book.  She begins her last chapter writing:

Fine mist falling, fog down to the decks of boats in the harbor. On the breakwater, shags and herons cluster, hunch-shouldered against gusts.  I see them through the spaces in his ribs.  I stare down into the cradle of his rib cage, basket of bones, hoop of barrel staves, empty frame… I want to crawl inside, huddle at his skull’s base, a dark, secret place, to listen (241).

The strength of this writing is in the way it plays with images and lyricism.  We can feel the sense of longing and loss inherent in the way Saulitis talks about the space between ribs and wanting to crawl inside.  But we can also feel the sense of hope and connection in the resiliency of the hunch-shouldered herons and listening.  This echoes the feelings and imagery that she uses at the very end of the book in which she writes, “That what’s broken can be mended. That what’s shattered can be made whole.  That what’s damaged can be repaired. That the end of the story is ‘and then –‘  And then there was Eyak. Always and forever. Amen” (245).  In this, she closes into great silence much in the same way she began it, through the lens of a poet, someone who felt on a very special level a connection to a group of whales and a place and wants to bring that connection to the reader.

As writers of nonfiction, we can use these devices in our own writing as well.  Like Saulitis, we can include poetic epigraphs to heighten the poignancy of our nonfiction stories.  We can also use poetic language, such as metaphors, to share not only the factual details of our experiences but also the emotional facets.  We can juxtapose the lyrical, emotional language of our areas of expertise or personal experience to give our readers a fuller, more true picture of the events.  The use of poetic language in nonfiction can serve to enhance the experiences we are sharing with our readers.  Evocative, lyrical language can help take stories off the page and make them more visceral and relatable for our readers.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.

You Must Be Crazy!: A Year-long Submission Bonanza!

Way back in July, I started my first Submission Bonanza!  This was an attempt to rack up rejections and embrace an aspect of writing that is difficult for me: putting myself out there.  My first Submission Bonanza was so successful and I learned so much from it that I resolved to keep it on the docket as something I did regularly.  I did another one in September and am starting to rack up more than just rejections from that one as well (news to follow!).

One of the habits that I resolved to develop in 2014 was to spend an hour a day on submitting my work to contests, literary magazines, etc.  I am hoping this means that I will be submitting something everyday, but there is a lot of work to do around submitting, so I’m not holding myself too hard to the number, more to the time I invest.  This, for me, is a year of forming habits over having goals.

In an effort to keep myself honest and also to share some great literary journals and contests, I’ll be posting a list here of where I submit to as I go.  Keep an eye on this spot for new magazines and competitions.  I’ll be updating it regularly.

  1. Classical Poets Contest
  2. California Genealogy Contest
  3. Glimmer Train
  4. The Paris Review
  5. Harper’s Magazine
  6. New England Review
  7. The Antioch Review
  8. The Southern Review
  9. EPOCH magazine
  10. The Gettysburg Review
  11. Yale Review
  12. Alaska Quarterly Magazine