Category Archives: Reading as writers

Consider what we can learn from the first paragraph of the first chapter of John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost. Here it is: Several centuries (or so) ago, in a country whose name doesn’t matter, there was a tall, skinny, … Continue reading →

Kij Johnson’s excellent The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe starts with the main character’s efforts to help one person, a former student, then the educational program where the main character works, then the university (Ulthar, in the quotation below), and the valley … Continue reading →

From Mentalfloss, a plotting of genres.

From our text, Josh Russell seems to use a museum catalogue to shape his story “Yellow Jack.” Rick Moody’s “Primary Sources” uses footnotes and a works cited page for a personal essay. J.G. Ballard’s “The Index” characterizes in unusual ways. How … Continue reading →

Here are some examples of prose poems. These are some poems for workshopping and here are some more. These are the first fiction fragments we’ll workshop. These are the second. Here are a third  and fourth for our consideration. Remember, you need to … Continue reading →

See the variations in form here, from the Oxford Book of Sonnets, and this couplet sonnet, “The Insusceptibles” by Adrienne Rich. Then the long sunlight lying on the sea Fell, folded gold on gold; and slowly we Took up our … Continue reading →

Consider how the lines of this poem focus/control the reader’s attention/experience. At what rate does information arrive? Why? How do the lines end? How is enjambment used? When is it used? What gives the poem closure? What work does the … Continue reading →

Little know fact: Shakespeare wrote “The Big Lebowski”: http://runleiarun.com/lebowski/.

I finished Lance Olsen’s Freaknestlast week. Very interesting. It’s easy to call it experimental speculative fiction. It takes place, for example, in a future full of astonishingly Godish technology that doesn’t seem to have solved a single enduring human problem. … Continue reading →