Glassworks
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 26
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2023
    • interview with Raina J. Leon
    • interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 26
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2023
    • interview with Raina J. Leon
    • interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
Glassworks

Cross-genre before it was cool

1/20/2014

0 Comments

 
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.

CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW
Picture
0 Comments

Blogging: the Post-Memoir

1/20/2014

0 Comments

 
Blogging: the Post-Memoir

Christina Schillaci
Pictureblogger.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. 

0 Comments

Google Poetry, Authorship, and Copyright

1/20/2014

0 Comments

 
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:
Picture
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:
Picture
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?

Read More
0 Comments

    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    September 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    October 2014
    April 2014
    January 2014
    March 2013
    February 2013


    Categories

    All
    Art
    Audio
    Bestseller
    Bibliotherapy
    Books
    Bookstores
    Career
    Cartoons
    Censorship
    Characters
    Cliche
    Code-switching
    Comedy
    Comics
    Controversy
    Culture
    Dyslexia
    Dystopian
    E-books
    Editorial
    Education
    Emoji
    Encyclopedia
    English
    Facebook
    Fandom
    Fanfiction
    Fantasy
    Fiction
    Film
    Future
    Gamebooks
    Gender
    Genre
    Google
    Grammar
    Habits
    Halloween
    Health
    Identity
    Journaling
    Kinesthetic Learning
    Language
    LGBTQ
    Library
    Literacy
    Literature
    Manga
    Marginalia
    Media
    Mental Health
    Multimodal
    Music
    New Media
    New York Times Best Seller List
    Nihilism
    Nonfiction
    Normalcy
    Nostalgia
    Obscenity
    Op Ed
    Opinion
    Pandemic
    Podcast
    Poetry
    Politics
    Process
    Pronouns
    Publishing
    Race
    Reading
    Rebuttal
    Research
    Rhetoric
    Rules
    Science Fiction
    Search
    Self-publishing
    Sequels
    Series
    Sexism
    Social Media
    Spoken Word
    Sports
    Standards
    Storytelling
    Student Writing
    Superheroes
    Teaching
    Technology
    Television
    The New York Times
    Trigger Warnings
    Trilogy
    Video Games
    Visual Novel
    War
    Wikipedia
    Workshop
    Writing
    Young Adult
    Zines


    RSS Feed


Picture

glassworks is a publication of
​Rowan University's Master of Arts in Writing
260 Victoria Street • Glassboro, New Jersey 08028 
glassworksmagazine@rowan.edu
​All Content on this Site (c) 2023 glassworks
Photos used under Creative Commons from RomitaGirl67, ** RCB **, George Fox Evangelical Seminary