opinion

The Coming Successes of Literature, and How They May (or May Not) All Include Bondage

2/15/2015

The Coming Successes of Literature, and How They May (or May Not) All Include Bondage

Kevin Coopersmith

Their names alone are enough to make you sigh profusely.

Here, watch: Twilight. Fifty Shades of Grey. To most lovers of words, the only thinking they inspire is in answering the question – what about them frustrates you more? Is it the endless conversation that breeds whenever a film or new saga of either set is released? Is it the way the books fly off the shelves and are quickly devoured by your friends who still seem to have failed to get around to reading that awesome Neil Gaiman book you recommended to them years ago? Or is the fact that these books, and their subsequent movies, have turned countless millions in revenue while the rest of the industry struggles to keep its head above water?

It’s a hard truth to realize, but that doesn’t make it any less real – America is reading, they’re just not reading anything of substance. As a matter of fact, the average American spends most of their day reading – 11 hours a day on average with digital media alone, according to a Nielsen study conducted last year. That’s 11 hours of channel surfing, Facebook walls, Twitter feeds, refreshed Reddit pages, and underwhelming Buzzfeed articles.

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Someone Talked: Spoilers in the Modern Age

1/15/2015

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Someone Talked: Spoilers in the Modern Age

Andrew Bates

There are certain unspoken rules amongst aficionados of media. One must always have a personal list of at least ten favorite works to call “the best” when called upon by others. When topics such as Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey come up, they must immediately refute them as terrible and trite. Using your cell phone in a dark movie theater is sacrilege. The arguably most important rule, and the one that is most common amongst media absorption, is that one must not reveal important dramatic turn of events.

In other words, tag your spoilers.

credit: The Daily Fandom

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The 320-Pound Racist in the (Locker) Room

10/1/2014

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The 320-pound racist in the (locker) room

Steve Royek

The professional football career of Richie Incognito is probably over and he faces a life of being known as the white player who harassed black teammate Jonathan Martin with threatening and racist texts and voice messages.

Could he, however, soon be trading in his orange and turquoise Miami Dolphins’ uniform for an orange prison jumpsuit?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

If Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had his way, he just might.

Of all the names swirling around this sad, salacious scandal of language-based threats and violent rhetoric, one of the most interesting might be that of the former U.S. Supreme Court justice. Holmes authored the landmark 1919 “Schenck v. United States” opinion that set legal guidelines

for violent speech with the often-quoted “shouting fire in a theatre” analogy. “Schenck” was the first high court ruling to carve out an exception to the once-absolute Freedom of Speech protection in the Bill of Rights.

Over the years, those exceptions have been crystalized into a three-part test of protected violent speech: Is there intent to commit a violent act, is that action imminent, and is there a strong likelihood the act will be carried out? All three of these tests appear to have been met in the Incognito affair, which opens up the player to criminal charges of terroristic threats.

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Fiction Writers' Workshops: Helpful or Harmful?

10/1/2014

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Fiction Writers' Workshops: Helpful or Harmful?

Image by blueearthchamber.com

Christi Fox

Among many tools available to fiction writers while working on a project is a writer’s workshop. Workshops are available in many different genres, including poetry workshop, fiction workshop and creative non-fiction workshop, just to name a few. As a graduate student, pursuing my MA in Writing, I’ve taken a number of workshops and in my own experience they’ve been useful to some degree but there were times when they’ve led to nothing but frustration due to battles among workshop peers as to what should or shouldn’t be in the piece I was currently working on. This led me to ask the question, are workshops helpful or harmful?

The writer’s workshop is a community of writers willing to share their work with others in order to provide and receive useful feedback on their current pieces. However, when we say “useful feedback,” how much is truly useful? What can the writer really use from the feedback given? Two sources that touch upon this topic are the online resource, 12 Writing, and William H. Coles from Editor Opinions Blog, a Companion to Story in Literary Fiction. Both of these sources discuss how to learn from a workshop and avoid an unnecessary sense of failure. Some workshops never instruct a writer on what they are doing right, leaving the writer to delete even the best parts of their work. I’ve experienced this first hand in one of the very first classes that I had in my master's program: the poetry workshop. Since I was a child, writing poetry has always given me a sense of security and pride, until my first workshop, when my pieces were completely ripped apart by some while praised by others. Those who ripped apart my pieces never once gave a bit of good feedback, which caused me to feel like, no matter what I did, those people would not be happy and I tore myself apart in continuing to try.

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Cutting Out the Middle Man

4/27/2014

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Cutting Out the Middle Man
Why Established Authors are Self-Publishing

Joseph F. Berenato

We've all heard the success stories: first-time author, turned down by every publishing house known to man, decides to self-publish an e-book and makes millions. Who needs a traditional publisher when you can horde all of the money for yourself, right?

Createspace.com Home Page

The advent of do-it-yourself publishing websites like CreateSpace has made creating a book – either paper or electronic – remarkably easy. With the hardest part – writing the thing – presumably out of the way, all one has to do is create an account, upload the book, add some graphics for the cover, and boom: instant book. CreateSpace will even assign your book an ISBN number and help you sell it through Amazon.

That’s where the ease ends, though. Granted, novelists like Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James first gained fame through self-publishing before becoming attached to a major publishing house. First-time novelists like Tina Folsom have sold more than a half-million e-books, eschewing publishers entirely. Success stories such as these, though, are seldom the rule and often the exception. Amazon is replete with examples of books that have sold no more than a few-hundred copies.

Even so, many established authors have begun to move away from traditional publishing in favor of doing it themselves. With success being such a seeming crap-shoot, why would they take the risk?

When asked for her opinion on the topic, author P.N. Elrod (best known for The Vampire Files series of novels) offered, “I'd rather make a 70% royalty on a digital book I published myself, than a 25% royalty from a book sold to a commercial house.” Her answer makes sense. It doesn't take an advanced math degree to determine that there’s more money to be made with higher royalties. The catch, though, is that an author only earns royalties if the book actually sells. For first-time self-publishers, that’s obviously a problem. It certainly holds its perils for established authors as well.

Robert Greenberger, an accomplished writer of comic book encyclopedias and science-fiction novels, summed up these perils succinctly. “The largest issue,” he said, “remains marketing and getting the word out, a problem plaguing every self-published author and one without a clear-cut solution.”

Indeed. While publishing houses have whole departments dedicated to advertisement and marketing, solo authors who strike out on their own seldom have more at their disposal than word-of-mouth and a pre-existing fan base. Beyond an Amazon author page, a few Facebook pages, a Twitter account and maybe a blog, affordable advertising options for solo authors are few and far between.

If established writers who already have a following are plagued by so many problems, it certainly doesn't seem a wise course of action for someone just starting out. “It's the right choice for me, but I don't recommend it to a neo writer,” Elrod agreed. “A lot of factors are involved. I've been around the block a few times and know what to expect. If I knew the magic formula to make huge sales, I'd be doing it now.”

Among the works that Elrod publishes are entries from deep in her catalogue that have long lain dormant. This is the best way for her to increase income from projects that have been out of the public eye for some time. “Many of my colleagues are selling well,” she opined. “Many more are not – there’s a lot of books out there – but it's still more than they'd get letting a book sit forgotten in a file.”

Re-releasing a popular author’s earlier works would seem like a logical (and relatively inexpensive) decision for any rational publishing house. According to Greenberger, though, publishers seldom make logical decisions, leading more authors to leave them behind. “Traditional publishers are too driven by inaccurate and incomplete data when making decisions,” he described, “letting marketing drive editorial which is the reverse of what made publishing the giant business it has been. As a result, too many projects I and my peers have been passionate about get rejected or ignored. Digital publishing removes an artificial barrier that lets us bring our passions directly to the readers.”

To that end, Greenberger went a step further than most. Not satisfied with simply self-publishing, he teamed up with fellow science-fiction authors Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Howard Weinstein and others to form Crazy 8 Press, their own

Crazy 8 Press Homepage

publishing imprint. “When it was clear a small group of good friends all felt the same way,” he explained, “the next logical step was to bring our overlapping but distinctive audiences to the same place to find our works and hopefully discover other projects of similar scope.”

Though marketing remains a problem, Greenberger and associates now have complete control over their future works and are thus able to maximize profits. As well, like Elrod and others, they offer in e-book format those entries from their back-catalogue to which they own the rights. On top of that, they have expanded their borders and are now welcoming other writers to join in on the action.

While Greenberger’s actions are a logical progression from mere self-publishing, forming one’s own press is obviously not going to be an action that everyone takes. Still, his actions are representative of a growing list of authors dissatisfied with the current state of mass-market publishing.

Traditional publishing houses may soon have to re-think their way of doing business or risk becoming obsolete. With very little investment (and very little risk) coupled with the potential for higher earnings, more authors will undoubtedly begin to cut out the middle man and do all of the work – and keep all of the money – for themselves.

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Television

4/27/2014

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Television Is Ruining My Relationship with My Parents: I Don't Blame Them

Brian Maloney

credit: dailyinvention via flikr

Whenever I visit my parents around dinner time, my dad has the television on. This is not uncommon. Around this time however, there are only a handful of syndicated comedies that he will watch. And most of them make me leave the room. When I complain to my parents about how terrible these television shows are, they reply that after working all day they just want to “veg out.” So what does this comment say about my parents? Like many Americans at the end of the day, my parents are tired of thinking.

The shows that they watch, shows like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, are ratings juggernauts. They win their respective time slots every time a new episode airs and their syndicated episodes have high ratings as well. To put these shows on at dinner time in the Philadelphia area, where I live, was a stroke of genius for the networks that chose to do so. They knew that they had viewers ready to leave their televisions on during dinner time, and once the show was over in the half-hour dinner block, they would run the same show again to keep those viewers right where they wanted them. It’s possible for these shows to run without continuity or out of order. They can be aired without having season long story arcs. Viewers can watch any episode at any time and not have to worry about what is going on. The concept of each show is simple enough for the casual and longtime viewer to be able to enjoy the show equally.

This does not mean that my parents are stupid or lazy. It just means that I am experiencing entertainment in a different way than they are used to. There are talk shows devoted to specific television shows now. Viewers can use specific hashtags during the program to tweet their feelings and read others feelings on the same subject. It is a new way of conveying feelings over entertainment that is unique to the internet generation. So while I may not like the shows that my parents watch, I can’t blame them for watching. Those shows rely on an old model of television. Something that the executives know has worked in the past and continues to work today.

During the Thursday night comedy blocks, NBC and CBS are frequently competing. CBS has Big Bang at 8 PM, while NBC has countered with a carousel of shows consisting of Community, Parks and Recreation, and 30 Rock. Why has NBC had such a hard time competing with CBS’s Big Bang Theory? Is it due to the revolving door of comedies that they have kept spinning? I believe it is because each one of these shows is a “thinkers” comedy with season long story arcs and sophisticated humor.

Now that viewers have any television show they want to watch in an instant through programs such as Netflix and Hulu, the older generations stick to what they know. Are they afraid of change? This seemed apparent when NBC gave over the late night reigns to popular-with-the-younger-generation’s Conan O’Brien. Most of the viewers who watched The Tonight Show ending up choosing David Letterman over O’Brien, which, according to the ratings, never happened when Jay Leno was at the helm. According to the Associated Press Conan had been, “averaging 2.5 million nightly viewers, compared with 4.2 million for Letterman's "Late Show," according to Nielsen figures.” It seemed as though the audience could not relate to O’Brien’s absurdist form of comedy and for that and poor ratings he was quickly booted. Jay Leno was promptly reinstated as the new/old host of Tonight. The changing of the guard was not embraced.

Traditions are supposed to be passed down from parents to children and I believe this includes entertainment choices as well. There are things that my parents have passed down onto me that I still partake in. There are still shows that I will watch with my parents that we all enjoy such as Boardwalk Empire. But when I try to tell them to watch a show they rarely get into it.

A show like Breaking Bad was another show that I tried to get them to watch and one that struggled in its ratings throughout most of its run. However, its cult following saved it from cancellation. Through word of mouth most viewers caught up due to DVD’s or Netflix in time for the final eight episodes. The viewership jumped through the roof from the season four finale to the series finale. According to Entertainment Weekly, Season four’s finale racked in 1.9 million viewers while the season five finale had 10.3 million viewers tune in. This is a testament to how good the show was, and a direct response from viewers who wanted to watch something of a higher quality on their Sunday evenings. The younger generations are calling for better programming.

This new generation of viewers is experiencing things in a vastly different way than the generations that came before. With the birth of the internet, everything we do can be recorded. We experience things differently. If we want to relive a moment over and over again we have the ability to. Everything can be over analyzed to death, if we want, and most of the time it is. When we watch a television show we can immediately relive it. As soon as a show ends we can use the internet to read how other people feel, what critics think, what certain references mean, and we can even express our own feelings through different media.

Our parents have never encountered television, movies, and other experiences in that way until now. Television that they grew up with was usually a single camera show with a laugh track. And another reason for the popularity of these shows that are winning in the ratings is the inclusion of the laugh track. Most of the comedies that lead the ratings include a laugh track; a designated cue of when to laugh. However, comedies are just beginning to break that mold such as the multi-camera comedy The Office on NBC which does not use the laugh track. This in turn causes the viewer to think about the previous joke and lets them decide when and when not to laugh.

Every generation wants to pass down traditions to their children, but their children change. Trends change, as does the thinking from generation to generation. My grandparents liked forms of entertainment that my parents did not understand, and I know that my children will not understand some of my entertainment choices as well. And that’s why I don’t blame my parents for liking what they do. The shows that they enjoy get good ratings because they are smart; they play to their audience and know what they like. As do my parents. They know what they like. And so do I. Even though I don’t always agree with their choices, I can see why they make them. They want to be entertained when they come home from work, and if that doesn’t involve a show that I like, then so be it. But I still reserve the right to roll my eyes, and leave the room.

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Cross-genre before it was cool

1/20/2014

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Cross-genre (before it was cool)

Amelia Thatcher

Genre seems like a rote device, four solidly identifiable modes of writing: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama. But long before writ- ers added hyper- links and embedded video to their work and called it mul- tigenre, tangible changes were un- derway to subvert rigid methods of expressing oneself. From gothic fiction to the invention of political science, writers were more inventive than any traditional view might hold.

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Blogging: the Post-Memoir

1/20/2014

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Blogging: the Post-Memoir

Christina Schillaci

blogger.com

The idea of the memoir has evolved beyond its former printed self. A traditional memoir details the personal accounts of one’s life in a book or a short story. While blogging follows this idea, the style is looser and written in a series of online entries that are updated regularly, giving bloggers the ability to add to ongoing conversations that are currently popular. But what makes these blogs interesting enough to read?

The same could be asked of memoirs on the shelves of our local book shops. When we pick up a book, we rarely question who wrote it. What difference does it make? We choose a book because we are interested in its themes: sadness, hardship, or maybe the love of a family. The author’s name is rarely the first thing to catch our attention. It’s not until we read and enjoy the book that we actively seek books by the same author. So is there really a difference between grabbing a printed memoir and scrolling through the posts of a blog about someone’s life? Successful blogs, like memoirs, use themes to draw readers in. It doesn't matter who wrote it. It’s what the story’s about.

Take, for instance, unknown musicians and film makers who use YouTube as a platform to start their careers as professionals. They aren’t famous. They perform in front of a video camera and post it online to get feedback and throw themselves out into the world. And then they are discovered. Who watches these videos and discovers these young people? Everyday, ordinary YouTube users who share similar interests. YouTube is post-television, in a sense; in turn, it leads us to the conclusion that blogging is the post-memoir.

Say you’re interested in running. Maybe you want to train for a marathon, or maybe you just want to get off your couch. There’s a large running community and with it comes an abundance of books, especially memoirs. You go to the book store and look for just that – a memoir about running, because that’s what you’re interested in.

Maybe, instead, you sit down at your desk with your computer. You want to find out about running through personal experiences. You want trails, warm ups, the best athletic wear. The blogger may log in miles per week and discuss what has helped him work past that knee injury he’s had since last spring. Hey may post about his diet or how he’s been training for a specific race. His success and experiences are different from any other blogger’s. A blog offers much of the same information as a memoir. You get a firsthand account, and instead of reading about something that has already happened, you are in step with the blogger, living and reading as he is living and writing. You are carried along for the ride. It’s a memoir unfolding, and you are observing the process.

In addition to blogs that center on a theme, there are just as many that are personal. These are the bloggers that captivate readers with their lives and the honesty behind their words. Blog posts often read like chapters of a gripping memoir. Instead of focusing on a theme and projecting it out into the digital world, personal bloggers pull the world in. As a people, we are enthralled by the lives of others. We read novels and memoirs about individuals we have never met. We want to know secrets that should be tucked away but instead are splayed out before us like Hershey bars on Halloween.

Let’s not forget that while there are a great number of blogs that are worth reading for literary value, there are just as many that are not. There are blogs that feature pictures of cats in boxes, blogs used as social networking platforms, and blogs for everything in-between. These are wonderful to surf on nights spent sitting pretzel-style on your bed, but if you’re looking for a blog that encompasses the idea of the post-memoir, you’re hard pressed to find it here. Blogging allows the reader to read a memoir as it happens, but that does not go to say that every blog you stumble upon will be literary.

Still, in the trending new genre of post-memoir, more blogs are taking on that literary oomph. Because blogs are kept current, the writer knows what readers want to hear based on responses and trending topics. Individual bloggers give readers information that can’t be found anywhere else but through that one unique lens. Blogging adds to the conversation, and with it come readers who are ready to discuss it.

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Google Poetry, Authorship, and Copyright

1/20/2014

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Google Poetry, Authorship, and Copyright
Jason Cantrell

In October 2012, a poet named Sampsa Nuotio created a site called “Google Poetics,” which posts submissions by poets from around the world, each of which is created in a nontraditional way. Each submission is derived from Google’s autocomplete suggestions, which appear when any Google user is typing in a search phrase. The suggested searches are predictions about what a user might be searching for, based on common searches performed by other users:

Screenshot of a Google search suggestion.

The suggested searches can form a unique and sometimes moving series of phrases that read like poetry: they demonstrate poetic repetition, show a particular mood or theme, and evoke an emotional reaction in the reader. A recent example from November 5, 2013 demonstrates how these poems can be very moving. The first line shows what the poet typed, and the following four lines show Google’s suggested searches:

Screenshot from www.googlepoetics.com.

The result reads like a poem, with the repetition of the phrase “Though I” as a way of contrasting the different lines. It has the tone of a poem, speaking about love and death, which are common themes in poetry. It even makes the reader consider the deeper meaning behind the lines, such as what the poet “disagreed with” and whether the “departure” in the last line might be an implied death. These elements are all common in poetry, but is this really a poem? Three important questions emerge when considering this style of poetry. First, can such a poem be considered a creative or literary work, when it was randomly generated with very little influence from the poet? Second, can the poet truly be considered the author of the poem, when they didn’t write it, but instead discovered it? And third, should such poems be protected under copyright, or instead be considered part of the public domain?

I would argue that this type of randomly-generated poetry still qualifies as creative work, and I would even go so far as to call it literary work. Random House defines creativity as “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.” With poetry, a poet transcends traditional rules about language by creating works that are unlike any normal language or written prose. They use various forms of structure, rhythm, meter, and rhyme to create something that has both an artistic form and a deeper meaning behind the words. These methods, however, become their own set of “rules,” which most traditional poets use to define what makes a poem a poem. The above poem shows some of these elements: there is a rhyme between the first two lines, and there is a structure in the use of “Though I” with the words “disagree, don’t, and depart.” By generating their poems randomly, however, Google poets are simply breaking another rule, the unwritten one where most poets assume they must choose each word of a poem themselves. This type of “found poetry” is not even unique to Google; for many years, poets have created works through such methods as cutting phrases out of books or collecting headlines from newspapers, then arranging their findings into a poetic form. Similarly, Google poets may experiment with various search phrases while searching for one that will bring them interesting results. They may be collecting their phrases from an outside source, but they still have a hand in the creative process. Not just any search phrase will make a good poem, and Google poets have a creative hand in finding the ones that will be the most inspiring.

These works are also literary in nature, rather than being mere forms of gimmicky entertainment. A literary work differs from other forms of creative works in that it holds a deeper meaning, or says something about life or society. This definition, however, is not exclusive to works that were generated in a certain form. A randomly generated poem can still hold a deeper meaning, particularly if the poet put a great deal of time and effort into searching until they found just the right poem. If a Google poet rejects multiple search results because they don’t hold the meaning they are trying to express, however, then this is no different from a traditional poet searching the thesaurus and rejecting multiple synonyms until they find just the right word. In the end, the result is still a creative work that the poet made through a certain process, regardless of whether part of that process is partially random.

Despite the fact that Google poems can be seen as creative and literary works, it can still be hard to consider who is the author of a poem. The Google Poetics site doesn’t list any of the authors, and in the FAQ for the site, they explain this by saying, “Typically the same poem, or nearly the same, is sent to us by several people.” This statement points out one of the flaws in “found poetry”: it can be found by more than one person. The Google search suggestions are based on a number of factors, and they can change over time depending on the recent trends in searches by all of Google’s users. Individual results may also change if a user is logged into their Google account, since Google will customize an individual’s search results based on their history. However, despite the differences, it’s possible for more than one person, typing in the same search results on the same day, to generate the same poem. Because of this, no one person can truly be considered the “author” of that poem. This could change with works that have a greater degree of personal control. For example, if a poet collected lines from Google and then rearranged them to send the message they wish to send, then they will be creating a work that is unique and differs from the results anyone else on Google could find. The unmodified search results, however (which comprise the majority of the results on the Google Poetics site) cannot truly be credited to any one author.

This question of authorship then leads into the question of copyright. If a poem cannot be considered to have a single author, can it be covered under copyright? The US Copyright Office defines the author of a work as “the creator of the original expression in a work.” When a poem is a found work, rather than an original work, it is difficult to consider the poet to truly be the creator of that work. Furthermore, the Google Terms of Service page says that “using our Services does not give you ownership of any intellectual property rights in our Services or the content you access.” Based on this, and due to the fact that it is Google’s computer code that actually generates these poems, it seems reasonable to say that any Google poems are in fact property of Google. Despite this, the Google Poetics website marks their content as copyrighted, and it may be with regard to their web page and how it displays the work posted there. However, since another poet could easily “find” the same poem on Google and post it separately on their own web page, the content itself is not covered under copyright law; only the format that the Google Poetics site uses to display it is covered. Since the Google poems on the site are posted as screenshots of the search results, and anyone can take the same screenshot from a different computer, Google Poetics cannot claim ownership over the work, only over their individual application of it.

Copyright laws may need to be updated as we continue moving into the digital age, and more grey areas like this emerge. In the meantime, poets creating this sort of randomly-generated work should use caution, and understand that the work that they post may not be considered their own. However, Google poems offer poets a new form of creative expression that, despite the differences from the norm, still result in original work that is clearly a product of their own talent and imagination.

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Prompt Perceptions

3/3/2013

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Prompt Perceptions:
Considerations of the Uses and Attitudes of Writing Prompts

Karen Holloway

image credit: ThinkGeek

A magazine exists, as part of a graduate program at the university where you are a grad student. You are an editor for this literary magazine. Your professor / managing editor gives you an assignment: Choose a specific and interesting literary-based topic and write an editorial. Add to the current discussions on this topic. 800-1500 words.

This is your prompt. Prompts are the topic provided, and the call to action for a writing task. They are the question or challenge for which we, the doers, are posed. You find this assignment interesting by nature. You decide to look into the prompt, that it is likely that such a thing cannot be dated to any specific event or time. But you wonder when the prompt as a literary device became popular? Your online search yields results like: “SAT Writing Prompts for Practice,” “A Goldmine of Journal Prompts,” “Getting Real: Authenticity in Writing Prompts.” These seem like a mix of exercises for students advancing to college, adults who enjoy writing, and professional and aspiring writers. However, you can recall being prompted in grade school. You once wrote a reinterpretation of a play, a nature journal, and of course, “What did you do over summer break?”

You think, it happened before that; when you were a small child? We prompt our children before they learn to read or write? “What other things start with the letter ‘D’? Can you tell me a story about the things you see on the way to school?” We do this to reinforce education out of the classroom, to encourage a fondness for long-term learning.

America’s college freshman composition classroom of the 1960s and 70s allowed free, expressive writing, new journalism and discussions of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement. With the 80s came the culture war and the “all-prompt,” career-driven curriculum. The 90s brought out the debate between the “personal” and the “academic” writing to be taught and the urge to identify political inequalities and empower students to take action through their writing. The 00s brought new questions between genre lines and the decline of the printed newspaper and the emergence of blogs. Now we explore new media writing and multimodal works; a realm where graphic memoirs and screen prose are being pushed. All this, through prompts from our teachers and peers or society.

There are perceptions surrounding prompts. Some writers find simple joy in them; approach them as brainstorming teasers or challenges.

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The Coming Successes of Literature, and How They May (or May Not) All Include Bondage

Someone Talked: Spoilers in the Modern Age

The 320-Pound Racist in the (Locker) Room

Fiction Writers' Workshops: Helpful or Harmful?

Fiction Writers' Workshops: Helpful or Harmful?

Cutting Out the Middle Man

Cutting Out the Middle Man
Why Established Authors are Self-Publishing

Television

Television Is Ruining My Relationship with My Parents: I Don't Blame Them

Brian Maloney

Cross-genre before it was cool

Blogging: the Post-Memoir

Google Poetry, Authorship, and Copyright

Prompt Perceptions

Prompt Perceptions:
Considerations of the Uses and Attitudes of Writing Prompts

Karen Holloway

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Fiction Writers' Workshops: Helpful or Harmful?

Cutting Out the Middle ManWhy Established Authors are Self-Publishing

Television Is Ruining My Relationship with My Parents: I Don't Blame ThemBrian Maloney

Prompt Perceptions: Considerations of the Uses and Attitudes of Writing PromptsKaren Holloway

Archives

Categories

Cutting Out the Middle Man
Why Established Authors are Self-Publishing

Television Is Ruining My Relationship with My Parents: I Don't Blame Them

Brian Maloney

Prompt Perceptions:
Considerations of the Uses and Attitudes of Writing Prompts

Karen Holloway