Word Pirates

According to the Million Writers Awards nominations received in the last five years, the top 12 online literary journals are:

• Eclectica (31 nominations)
• Pindeldyboz (26)
• Agni (16)
• Strange Horizons (16)
• Word Riot (16)
• Narrative Magazine (15)
• Fiction Warehouse (13)
• The King’s English (12)
• Mississippi Review (12)
• Blackbird (11)
• Blithe House Quarterly (11)
• Storyglossia (11)

Check them out. (Via)

~ Joy

I do not think everyone should be a writer, but I do think that everyone should write… or paint, or craft, or build things, or bake. You can make a pretty strong argument that the point of life–or one of them anyway–is to create. Or maybe I just come from a family of artists/craftsmen, so life just looks that way to me.

Anyway, NPR has a good interview with Lynda Barry on the subject of creativity, which she wrote about in her new book What It Is. She talks about how it is strange that we can be so creative as children and then completely drop it when we reach adulthood.

“Something happens to us as we get a little older,” she says. “Adults would never consider [drawing] on a piece of paper and then just throwing it away afterwards. In fact, unless it’s valuable afterwards, most adults don’t think the experience was worth it. So that’s kind of what the book is about. It’s about what happens. What happens to that creative urge.”

It’s true, not everyone is creative–the world needs accountants, after all–but we can all create something. If nothing else, we can create life, which is pretty profound if you ask me, and points to the larger role of creativity in society. So why then have we become a society of observers and consumers? Screw that, America! There’s no joy in it. Break out the crayons.

~ Joy

This month, the Word Pirates are studying literary journals. At the next two meetings, we will be reading stories from them and talking about them as writing markets. If you’re having trouble finding one, Lit Scribbler has a nice little list of some journals of interest. Check it out.

~ Joy

Frank Wilson has been reviewing books professionally since October, 1964. For most of the past decade he was Books Editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer… He retired recently. About five years ago he started blogging at Books Inq…

You can hear an interview with Wilson here.

I hate coming up with a title for something I’ve written! I hate it, and I am really terrible at it. Of course, a title isn’t more important than your writing. However, I think the title is an important part of the work.

So I am completely amused and surprised by the, well, terrible titles F. Scott Fitzgerald had for his works. I can understand his frustration that publishers were changing the titles against his wishes. But, man, I think they ultimately did him a service.

This Side of Paradise started life as The Education of a Personage. The Beautiful and Damned was at one stage due to be called The Flight of the Rocket. But the biggest struggle of all was over the book we know as The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald wanted to call it Trimalchio or, later, Trimalchio in West Egg. There’s a reference in the story to Gatsby beginning to forfeit his role as a modern Trimalchio, but that isn’t much help to those who have never heard of Trimalchio. I’d assumed he must be some walk-on part in a lesser known play by Shakespeare, who more than any other has been pillaged for titles. In fact he’s a character in the Satyricon (by Petronius) who, Gatsby-like, is constantly entertaining on a vulgarly lavish scale. The publishers, Scribner’s, insisted on Gatsby. On the eve of publication Fitzgerald demanded that Trimalchio be reinstated. But too late. The book had already been advertised with the title that it now bears.

Link

-marcia

More controversy over VQR’s airing of nasty comments its editorial folks made over submissions. This time, Howard Junker, editor of Zyzzyva, is speaking out against the blog post, asking, “Since when are Genoways and his minions entitled to Righteous Indignation while winnowing the infinite chaff from the most rare wheat?”

Now Ted Genoways from VQR has responded to Junker. Ooh… Fight! Fight!

Seriously, editors, just don’t publicly make fun of your submissions. It’s tasteless. (Privately, of course, do whatever you want.) (Via)
~ Joy

I enjoyed what Stephen Corey at Georgia Review had to say about the short story in the most recent issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

If you are truly serious about doing distinctive work that will make its mark, slow down.

A great poem or story or essay is not a line on a vita, a selling point in a job interview, or a ticket to tenure. Any person who writes one great poem or story or essay per year for twenty years will take his or her place on the short list of the finest writers of all time. Slow down. Read voluminously, year after year, both for pleasure and to be reminded of all that you must not do, and all that you must exceed, in order to make your own special, indelible mark.

That’s a good reminder that writing should be a construction of a work of art, and sometimes that means taking the time you need to really finish it. As long as, you know, you are actually working on it and not, say, watching re-runs of Family Guy on Cartoon Network… (or blogging…).

~ Joy

One of the core beliefs of Word Pirates is that writing should be entertaining. It should have a pace, avoid being self-indulgent, and keep the reader’s attention span in mind. I think the reason so few people read lit journals and anthologies these days is because so much of them are frankly boring. I mean, yes, people are reading less and there’s more competition for their time and blah, blah, blah, but also, for reals, much of modern literature is boring, stodgy and pretentious. (And much of it is over-commercialized and gimmicky, which is the other side of the same ugly coin, I guess.)

Anyway, all that to say, someone agrees with me–about essay anthologies, at least. I have had the 2007 Best American Essays sitting on my shelf for five months now, and I have yet to open it. Why? Well, David Foster Wallace edited it, and he is known for a brand of essay that I have low tolerance for: long ones about tiny things that don’t really interest me; essays that try my patience as the writer examines every side of the tiny thing or strings tiny things together with admittedly excellent language but just a hint of self-indulgence as well.

Is it just me who finds it hard to finish these kinds of essays? It’s such a chore. Your mind wanders. You count the number of pages to the end. You worry you’re not getting the point, assuming there is one. Well, I hope it’s just me, because apparently it’s the preferred tone for essays nowadays:

The essay that is considered “literature” in our day is not an ambitious or impassioned (if sometimes foolhardy) analysis of human nature. It is not an argument, or a polemic. It is not a gun-blazing attack on a social trend, a film, a book, or a library of books. Those sorts of pieces, sniff the anthologists, are mere journalism.

The essay they prefer has a distinctive tone, which Epstein has called “middle-aged.” I’m not an age-essentialist, but Epstein is, and what he means by “middle-aged” is clearly quiet. Slow-moving. Soft-hitting. Nostalgic. Self-satisfied. It’s the tone he perfects in his signature essay, “The Art of the Nap.”

I also liked this bit:

It’s tempting to create a composite portrait of the Preferred American Essayist: Educated at Harvard, he or she has spent significant time at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, written proposals for New York Public Library Fellowships (often lovingly paraphrased in the essays) and received medical attention at Sloan Kettering Hospital. Chances are good she’s a doting dog owner who has done such things as lace her pet’s dinner with “Prozac, Buspar, Elavil, Effexor, Xanax, and Clomicalm” (Cathleen Shine, 2005) or write gourmet cookbooks for his discerning palate (Susan Orlean, 2005 and 2006). More likely than not, he (if it is a he) has had a lifelong love affair with fishing or baseball, preferably both. An added bonus is to discover—or at least reassess—a Jewish ancestor in one’s family tree.

This article gets at another of my pet peeves: It seems like no one tries to address big ideas anymore in essays–friendship and wisdom and what is man and who is God and all that. Truth, after all, is big, scary, and seemingly subjective. We’re told that we can’t know truth, but really, I think it’s just easier not to try. (God? Who knows. But this paper clip on my desk, that is definitely there.) Could this be why our intellectual culture seems so stagnant? Why there’s so few new philosophies or political thoughts these days?

I understand the hesitation to take on a big truth. To write about a large issue is to take on all of its history, all that has been written on the subject, and to state that you have something interesting to add to this long, intimidating conversation. That is hard. But Cristina Nehring, who wrote this fine article, thinks it’s time for a change.

Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be. As long as persons with intellectual aspirations are counted idiots for attempting to formulate a wider point, they will not do so, and even if they dared, most editors would not publish them and most critics would not praise them.

I agree.

Apparently, though, these thoughts are not new.

And Seneca, like Montaigne, like Francis Bacon, like Samuel Johnson, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, like Henry David Thoreau, was in the business of learning—and in the process of showing others—how to live and die. “Philosophy is good advice,” writes Seneca, before proceeding to mock the scholars of his own age who (precisely like those of ours) spend their time playing word games and toying with their navels. “I should like those subtle thinkers … to teach me this, what my duties are to a friend and to a man, rather than the number of senses in which the expression ‘friend’ is used. It makes one ashamed,” he declares, “that men of our advanced years should turn a thing as serious as this into a game.”

Exactly, Seneca. Exactly.

Read the article here. (Via)

~ Joy

Petaluma’s Word Pirates put on a show to entertain and scintillate your senses… with literature!

Petaluma, Calif., May 15 – Word Pirates, a professional writing group, will host its second annual reading on May 15. True to their name, the Word Pirates will commandeer the Phoenix Theater to tell tales that could rouse a dead man.

Last year’s standing-room-only reading featured local artists, gripping stories, and a surprise pirate duel. This year’s event will be even better. Doors will open at 7:30 p.m., with pirate-themed appetizers, grog, and surprise entertainment. Then the Word Pirates will read original pieces created in the group during the last year. This event is free and all are welcome. Peg legs and parrots must be checked at the door.

Word Pirates Reading
Date: Thursday, May 15
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Place: The Phoenix Theater – 201 Washington St., Petaluma
Cost: Free (donations welcomed)

Reading at the Event: Robin Cadogan, Morgan Elliott, Joy Lanzendorfer, Ross Lockhart, and Marcia Simmons.

For more information, visit www.wordpirates.org, e-mail wordpirates@gmail.com, or call 707-782-0971. Arrr!

***

About the Group: Word Pirates is an independent writing group dedicated to the development and publication of creative writing. Co-founders Joy Lanzendorfer and Marcia Simmons chose the group’s name to reflect that while the group takes writing seriously, they don’t take themselves too seriously. You can visit the Word Pirates online at www.wordpirates.org.

Joy Lanzendorfer is a freelance writer living in Petaluma. Her work has been published in Writer’s Digest, The Writer, Salon, Imbibe, Paste, Bay Nature, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacific Sun and the North Bay Bohemian, among others. She also has an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she sat on the editorial board for Fourteen Hills Literary Journal. She was a judge in last year’s Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Award.

Marcia Simmons is an author services manager for Federated Media Publishing. Previously, she was the managing editor for the North Bay Business Journal, a New York Times publication. She was an editor and contributor for Project Censored’s annual book of censored stories and produced radio and TV programs for the organization. Her blog can be found at www.smartkitty.org.

Librarything is a site where you can catalog your books. There’s a group on the site, titled “I See Dead People’s Books,” that collected the collections of some famous dead folks.

Always wonder if Tupac Shakur and Marie Antoinette read the same books? Now you can find out! (I’ll spoil this one for you … they didn’t.)
-Marcia