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Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.
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Think of a piece of gossip you've heard and identify the least sympathetic person involved. Maybe it's the adulterous mother of two? Or the Salvation Army bell ringer who, during the holidays, pocketed some of the donations he'd collected? Write a story from the perspective of the least sympathetic person with the piece of gossip as the narrative climax. You might also try writing the story with the piece of gossip as the inciting action of the story, as the event that sets everything in motion. This week's fiction prompt comes from Bret Anthony Johnston, fiction writer and editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer.
The "mortal work of art," as Shelley Jackson called her 2003 story "Skin," each word of which has been tatooed on the skin of over two thousand volunteers, has found new form in this clip. The author recently asked her original volunteers to record a video of their word tattoo. She then edited the word videos together to create a new story for the Berkeley Art Museum.
In this clip, produced by Open Road Media, novelist Pat Conroy talks about his early years as the eldest of seven children raised in a strict military household in Beaufort, South Carolina. "I was making up stories about my life at a very early age," says the author of The Prince of Tides and The Lords of Discipline. "I was writing fiction long before I knew I was writing fiction."
In this clip by Seth Weiner, a robot re-enacts the typing of a love letter from Franz Kafka to Felize Bauer, who Kafka met on August 13, 1912. In the letter, which can be found in Letters to Felice (Schocken, 1987), Kafka "makes reference to typing the letter on a typewriter and expresses the impact the new writing device has on his train of thought."
The winner of the 2011 Story Prize, the annual twenty-thousand-dollar award for a collection of short fiction, was announced on Wednesday night. Idaho author Anthony Doerr received the honor for his fourth book and second story collection, Memory Wall (Scribner), a series of stories investigating memory and its relation to sense of self.
Judges John Freeman, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Marie du Vaure selected Doerr's book from a three-strong shortlist that also included Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House) and Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not an Option (Norton). Li and Rivecca each received five thousand dollars.
Memory Wall also won the Pacific Northwest Literary Award and made recommended reading lists at the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Doerr has received numerous honors for his previous work, including two O. Henry Prizes, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize.
Here's what critics had to say about Memory Wall.
"Doerr is daring, yes, and compassionate, but more than anything, the four stories and two novellas in this collection are imbued with, and fueled by, a deep, almost anachronistic-seeming respect for his twin muses: memory and the natural world." Jeff O'Keefe for the Rumpus
"The impetus of a Doerr story is always a movement toward transcendence, and the process is what matters, not the vehicles: not the metaphors, not the tricky plots, not the local color, not the occasional bursts of melodrama. It’s the flow of experience toward something resembling
meaning, a sense of one’s place in time." Terrence Rafferty for the New York Times Book Review
"[Doerr] has a scientist's eye, a lyrical sensibility, and an impressively global canvas." Justine Jordan for the Guardian
In the video below, Doerr discusses books that blew his mind.
[Correction: Story Prize winner Anthony Doerr received an award of twenty thousand dollars, not ten thousand dollars, as previously reported.]
Each year the University of Oregon Libraries hosts an Edible Book Festival featuring examples of edible artwork that "must be made from consumable components and reflect the concept of 'the book' through the use of text, form, or literary inspiration." The next Edible Book Festival will be held on March 31. Check out similar events at Duke, Xavier, the University of Puget Sound, and other schools across the country.
Make a list of five physical artifacts that seem to lack emotional weight, the more mundane the better. A donut, a vacuum cleaner, a pair of socks, etc. From your list, choose one of the artifacts, and use it as the emotional linchpin of a story. Write a story in which, say, a vacuum cleaner takes on enormous and surprising emotional significance to a character. For an example of how this can work, read Ann Beattie's story "Janus" from her collection Where You'll Find Me and Other Stories (Scribner, 2002). This week's fiction prompt comes from Bret Anthony Johnston, fiction writer and editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer.
The finalists for this year's PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which carries a prize of fifteen thousand dollars, were announced today. The shortlisted authors are Jennifer Egan for her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Deborah Eisenberg for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador); Jaimy Gordon for her National Book Award-winning novel Lord of Misrule (McPherson); Eric Puchner for his novel Model Home (Scribner); and Brad Watson for his story collection Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (Norton).
How does a judge manage to winnow all those entries? "There's a little sound a hardback book makes when it's first opened,
not exactly a squeak but almost, and that sound became familiar," says Furman. "When I
felt unsure, groggy, or worst, compromising, my fellow judges were
there—as were the best of the books—to remind me to keep to the
strictest of standards, those of my heart, instinct, and intelligence."
The winner of the thirty-first annual award will be announced during a
ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. on May 7.
In the video below, Egan reads from her nominated book at New York City's Franklin Park Reading Series.
This especially cinematic (and dramatic) book trailer for T. C. Boyle's thirteenth novel, When the Killing's Done, published last week by Viking, was directed by Jamieson Fry. Check out the first lines of this and eleven more new and noteworthy books in this issue's Page One.
Write a scene for a story, set in a kitchen, with two characters. One of the characters is keeping a secret from the other. (The secret can be as big as, "You're adopted" or as small as, "I forgot to pay the cable bill.") The character with the secret doesn't reveal it, but still the secret bears down on everything the characters say to each other, the way they touch or don't touch each other, the things and places they turn their eyes to. Let the secrets either emerge or disappear, depending on the way the story evolves. This week's fiction prompt comes from novelist Lauren Grodstein, author most recently of A Friend of the Family (Algonquin Books, 2009).
