Sadly, I speak only one language – English – fluently. 

But life and opportunity will forever have their way. 

Let me tell you a story.

In high school, I was a serious student with college aspirations.  My class schedule was chockablock with college prep classes. I visited the guidance counselor regularly to ask what else I should be doing. Regular visits, each school year for three years. Every visit I was told that what I was doing was sufficient. That there was nothing else – no other classes, clubs, activities – I could do to improve my academic chances to get into college.

Two years later at my library job, I checked out books for a woman whose high school freshman daughter was studying to take her first AP exam. And with that interaction, I discovered a world of books for AP classes and CLEP exams. 

I also learned an open secret. Opportunities come not only through actively seeking them out but just as often from being open – watching and listening – to life and the people around you. 

Decades later and after a series of life-altering experiences, I got serious about writing. I joined AWP (Association of Writing and Writing Programs) and attended my first writing conference, AWP2018. I met novelist Diane Zinna, then the AWP Director of Membership Services, the second day of the conference at the AWP membership booth. She encouraged me to apply for their Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, which is free to AWP members.

I was accepted into the three-month mentorship in poetry on my first try. With that bit of providence, I learned another part of being open – action. 

A Hand Up

Mentorships are built – formally and informally – into academic study. Outside of academia finding a mentor can be difficult but not impossible. However, formal education is not always a viable option for everyone. You’re here at DIY MFA, so you know there are other ways to get education as well as mentorships. You can also get access to nonacademic mentorships through writing associations and other programs such as Pitch Wars and Author Mentor Match.   

But why is having a writing mentor a big deal? 

Having one fosters a more personalized and intimate study of your own work and your chosen genre of writing. A mentorship can deepen the range and skills needed to produce your best work. 

My Writer to Writer mentorship with poet Callista Buchen was affirming and enlightening. She answered craft and writing business questions. She critiqued my poems. We discussed other poets’ work. She also encouraged me to focus on three areas to expand my writing and my writing career: compile a poetry manuscript, apply for writers’ residencies, and collaborate with other poets.  

Working with Callista, I could see where the knowledge gleaned from my self-directed study fit into a writing career, into my writing career. 

At the same time, Diane Zinna, the mentorship’s creator, forged a community among all of my cohort’s mentees. The diversity of writers – age, ethnicity, writing experience/genre – encouraged us to share our work and try new things. It laid groundwork for me to try a budding Romanian-English translation project with fellow W2W cohort, poet Romana Iorga. 

Impossible Means I’m Possible

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

― Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

No matter where we are in this writing life, we’re all prone to fear and anxiety. (Lord knows, I am.) 

Fear makes it easy to retreat and label things as impossible or not for us. Reaching out can push us past the supposed impossibility of our dreams. When you stretch yourself and step into places, into work you think of as impossible, you’ll find much is within your grasp. You’ll find in the “impossible” your own version of “I’m possible”. 

Below is a small sampling of writing mentorships available. They are projected to operate during (and beyond) these viral times.

Emerging Translator Mentorship Program

Founded by former American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) board member Allison M. Charette, the Emerging Translator Mentorship Program was “designed to establish and facilitate a close working relationship between an experienced translator and an emerging translator on a project selected by the emerging translator.” The mentorship lasts for approximately nine months. 

Romance Includes You

This Harlequin-sponsored mentorship “offers aspiring romance writers from underrepresented communities the chance to work one-on-one with a Harlequin editor for a year on writing a romance novel and includes an offer to publish their book and $5,000 (US) to support their novel writing.”

SFWA Mentoring Initiative

Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America connects “emerging writers to each other and to established pros” to build community, share knowledge, and network. For SFWA members only, it is focused on professional development rather than artistic development.  

We Need Diverse Books Mentorships

WNDB offers an annual opportunity for eight aspiring authors to be matched with an experienced children’s book creator and receive individual support and feedback on a completed draft of a work-in-progress or your portfolio. The mentorship lasts one year. 

Resource websites

Mentorships and opportunities for mentorships often hide in plain sight. Many websites that regularly compile writing opportunities often include mentorships opportunities as well. The following websites either compile opportunities or feature articles about mentorship how-tos.

Galleyway   

Founded by New York-based writer Camille Wanliss as a resource to champion “diverse voices in literature, poetry, television, film and theater by spotlighting opportunities for writers of color.”  Mentorships, fellowships, and publication opportunities are added monthly.

The Practicing Writer 2.0

Reader, writer, and literary advocate Erika Dreifus edits/publishes the free (and popular) e-newsletter that features opportunities and resources for fictionists, poets, and writers of creative nonfiction.

Trish Hopkinson: A Selfish Poet 

Hopkinson offers poetry/writing resources including mentorships at her website. She also provides a list of other websites with poetry/writing and submitting resources. She is also a Writer to Writer mentee from Fall 2019.

Writer’s Knowledge Base

Curated by cozy mystery author Elizabeth Spann Craig, Writer’s Knowledge Base is a search engine of over 40,000 articles on all aspects of writing.

Apply for mentorships whether you believe you’re ready or not. And write in the meantime; write regularly. Habit is the best tool against fear and self-limitation. If an established mentorship isn’t for you, set up your own mentorship. 

Your love for writing will have led you to or along the fringes of other writers and/or writing groups. Is there a writer (or possibly writers) in the group whose work you admire? 

After you’ve thought out what you’d like to learn from them, ask if they would be willing to share craft techniques and writing wisdom with you. If they agree, you can discuss how much or little time they’re willing to work with you.  

A mentorship requires work from you. Ask questions AND listen…a lot. Take advantage of the mentor’s experience by asking these two questions: What questions should I be asking to get the best from this experience? What questions would you ask if you were me?

No worries if you don’t remember to ask these questions. You might be too overwhelmed with processing the incoming information to ask anything other than procedural questions. However, there’s no time limit on asking. Leave space for you to reconnect with your mentor(s) and to ask more questions. Whatever information you gather later will always be of help to you and give you wisdom/knowledge to share with other writers.   

Whether you find a mentor or decide to be your own mentor, now is as good a time as any. Don’t be afraid to take a path you never thought of traveling. I promise it can and will make all the difference in your writing life.

Who knows what paths will open for you?

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post How to Establish a Literary Mentorship appeared first on DIY MFA.

At DIY MFA, my fellow writers and I write in order to instruct and encourage you, our readers, to try new things and add to your repertoire of knowledge and skills. I would be remiss in not applying the same to myself. So, let’s learn about this exciting type of writing together.

Librettists and Dramatists and Lyricists, Oh My! 

What are libretti? The term is the plural of libretto. If you are a fan of opera, musical theatre, or ballet, you’ve actually read a portion of a libretto. And you probably didn’t even think about it apart from the show you were attending. It was simply part of the opera/ballet/theatre-going experience. Yet, there’s more to libretti than the small booklet you were handed.

Writers of libretti are called librettists. Librettists write the story, script and lyrics for operas, musicals, and ballets. These specialized playwrights are also referred to as dramatists and book writers. They are additionally called lyricists when their work involves writing lyrics for a show’s songs.  However, a lyricist’s job does not generally include penning libretti.

The renowned Berklee College of Music offers this definition of a librettist: 

“A particular variety of playwright who specializes in the intersection between text, music, and theater […] [T]he librettist’s first job is often to create a “treatment”: a short document which contains an outline of the characters, story, dramatic structure, and scripted dialogue of the work. If the treatment interests [backers], the librettist might begin to develop a full script—often referred to as the show’s libretto or “book”—without which an opera or musical would simply be a staged concert or song cycle.”

In opera and musical theatre, the composer reigns supreme in terms of publicity and public recognition. In dance theatre, choreographers share the top space with composers. Librettists often recede into the background. Yet, some librettists — past and present — have fully broken into the limelight. Stephen Sondheim, W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, W. S. Gilbert, and Lin-Manuel Miranda are a small sampling of star librettists. 

The Order of Things 

Besides operas, musicals, and ballets, libretti – Italian for little books – are written for operettas, oratorios, and cantatas. While it’s difficult to find a specific page length for an average libretto, the form is characterized by its brevity.  Most libretti, with variations for show genre included, end at substantially less than 100 pages.  

When writing a libretto, a librettist uses the following style tenants:  

• Un uncomplicated vocabulary – i.e. 8th grade – and grammar
• Clear and easy to follow story lines
• Relatable characters, but no stereotypes
• Situations that call characters into song
• Room for song/dance to finish plot and character development
• Smooth transitions between text and song/dance 

Librettists come from varied writing backgrounds such as plays, poetry, fiction, screenplays and other types of professional writing. Surprisingly, collaborative ability, rather than music knowledge, tops the list of skills needed for a budding librettist. 

With this last Deep Dive article, I’m going to break away from my format of offering examples. Why? There’s no succinct way to illustrate how libretti and the various show forms interact. It requires experiential interaction, i.e. reading the libretti along with the show’s video and/or audio accompaniment. I suggest studying the following short list of librettists, libretti (as well as their inspiration) and shows considered excellent examples of the respective genres:

Many Doors, One You

If writing libretti is new to you, here are links to learn more about being a librettist, training, and fellowship/mentorship opportunities:

• @LibrettistNet (Twitter) – The Librettist Network aims to develop the craft of libretto writing, ensure librettists are valued, find new voices & develop new work. 

• Composer Librettist Development Program – This program is the only full-time professional mentorship initiative for operatic writers in the country. It  is hosted by American Lyric Theatre and begins its next cycle in Fall 2021. 

• How to Become a Librettist, Stephen Plaice – This article in The Guardian is an informative overview of becoming an opera librettist. Plaice was the 2015 writer-in-residence at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

• Jerwood Opera Writing Programme – This UK program is made up of two parts: Foundation and Fellowships. The Foundation provides a year-long course of workshops and seminars to help with creating new opera. Fellowships facilitate new opera development by providing financial support, mentoring, and expertise to creators over a two-year period.

• On the Art of Libretto Writing, Terry Quinn – Librettist Terry Quinn addresses being a librettist in three articles –

• Opera Jobs: The Librettist (video) – Librettist Emma Jenkins talks about her work as an opera librettist with the English National Opera.

• Rules for Writing Libretto, Joshua McGuire – Librettist Joshua McGuira lays out his rules for writing libretto and rule #1 is “Don’t.” Thankfully he doesn’t stop there but offers seven other rules to start beginning librettists off right.

• Sotto Voce: The Libretto as Literary Form, Dana Gioa – This essay, in poet Gioa’s “Nosferatu: An Opera Libretto”, gives an enlightening glimpse into what a writer considers when deciding to write a libretto.

Although I focused primarily on older works, the world of libretti is very much alive. Original operas, ballets, and musicals are created regularly through arts organizations, foundations, universities, and independent productions. All of which require the librettist’s expertise. And thankfully, these productions open their doors to a more diverse and inclusive group of writers. Maybe, even you.

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post Deep Dive into Short Forms: Libretti appeared first on DIY MFA.

My reading was – and still is – catholic (except I avoid anything dealing with westerns and politics). The joy of finding new topics and authors is why I pick books at random at bookstores and libraries. I rarely look at covers. I focus on titles and then delve into the book’s middle. I look for a glimpse into the book’s heart…and, too, the author’s mind.  This somewhat haphazard habit is how I discovered the beauty and mental muscularity of James Baldwin’s political essays. Yes, political essays. 

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Essays

I blame that bit of off the rails behavior on an undergraduate composition class. Its entire focus was the essay. What could have been a drudge-worthy class full of dry scribbles was instead enlightening. In it, I discovered words’ power to solve problems, to educate, to change another’s mind, to clarify. The instructor, Dr. Sipiora, taught us how to sculpt our own words into powerful vehicles, essays.

But what is an essay? And what makes it so powerful? Merriam-Webster defines essay as a “literary composition usually dealing with its subject from a limited or personal point of view”. The term itself, essay – from the French essayer, “to attempt” or “to try” – encapsulates its aim to influence the reader. While an essay’s topic can be whatever subject a writer chooses, it will fall under the following types: analytical, argumentative, expository, or persuasive.

Analytical essays generally examine, analyze, and interpret. They tend toward academic subjects such as art, literature, and social or political events. Argumentative essays set out to prove the writer’s opinion, theory or statement is more credible than another’s. Many political essays tend to be framed as such. Expository essays have an explanatory bent. They are often written to explicate a particular issue, theme or idea. 

Persuasive essays aim to convince readers to adopt the writer’s position on an issue or point of view. The writer gives good or beneficial reasons for the reader to do so. 

Any and all of that influencing power within bounds. I believe much of an essay’s power comes from length. Essayist extraordinaire Roxane Gay, in discussing the preferred length of essays, opined: “[Essay length] varies. Sometimes an essay needs to be 700 words and sometimes, 7,000 words. 2,500 -­ 3,500 is a sweet spot.” 

Let Your Love Shine In

The success in writing essays lies in the writer’s love of her subject. One great example of this is Roxane Gay’s New York Times Op-Ed piece, Ask Roxane: Is It Too Late to Follow My Dreams? on Dec. 30, 2017.  It’s also a fantastic example of a persuasive essay. 

Gay fields letters from two writers of what she calls “a certain age.” Both writers ask a version of “Is it too late to follow my dream?” She answers first in recounting her own writing experiences.

Let’s Read: 

“I was incandescent with envy — so many breathless stories about people my age and often younger who were discovered by a hotshot agent, who sold a book for six or seven figures, who created a popular blog and parlayed that success into a full-time writing career. 

The writing world was passing me by. I was never going to be noticed. I was going to spend my life working mediocre jobs, writing in obscurity, and before long it was going to be too late. I was going to turn 30 and then 35 and after that, I couldn’t even speculate because I was either going to have a bestselling book by the age of 35 or my dream would be not merely deferred but dead, dead, dead.”

She tells them that even after she got some success, she still worried. The success she experienced didn’t look like what she had imagined. [An interesting aside, Gay was 38 when she sold her two books: Bad Feminist, a book of essays, and Untamed State, a novel.] Gay says that she wished, “I could have told myself when I was hopeless about my writing prospects is that I should have defined artistic success in ways that weren’t shaped by forces beyond my control.”

She follows this information with writing/writing industry realities. 

Let’s Read:

“Sometimes, success is getting a handful of words you don’t totally hate on the page. Sometimes success is working a full-time job to support your family and raising your kids and finding a way, over several years, to write and finish a novel. Sometimes it’s selling a book to a small press for 25 copies of your book and a vague promise of royalties you may never see. And sometimes, if you are very lucky, artistic success is marked by the glittery things so many of us yearn for — the big money deals, the critical accolades, the multicity book tours, the movie options.”

She ends with turning the writers’ view inward. She asks them to examine their own writing expectations and realities. Writing is not a zero-sum game. Gay reminds them that “[t]he literary flavor of the week did not get your book deal.” She leaves them with reality, one with an ever-open door for dreams:

“Write as well as you can, with as much heart as you can, whenever you can. Make sure there are people in your life who will have faith in your promise when you can’t. Get your writing in the world, ideally for the money you deserve because writing is work that deserves compensation. But do not worry about being closer to 50 or 65 or 83. Artistic success, in all its forms, is not merely the purview of the young. You are not a late bloomer. You are already blooming.” 

New and Different Worlds

If writing essays is new to you, take a look at the following anthologies, books, articles, and websites to learn about the technique and craft:

• The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, Phillip Lopate – This anthology gives an overview of the personal essays from the ancient world to the 20th century.

• Best American Essays: This annual anthology series offers an overview of current essayists and the topics being discussed. It can easily serve as a practical primer for approaching essay writing.

• Collected Essays: James Baldwin, edited by Toni Morrison

• Crafting The Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Non-Fiction: Dinty W. Moore – A hands-on, creativity-expanding guide to help you explore the flexibility and power of the personal essay.

• DIY MFA interview: Exploring Essay Writing: An Interview With Jayne English: My interview with Relief Journal essayist Jayne English on generating ideas and creating depth in essays.

• Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit – “A passionate, thought provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity.”

I’m long past my undergraduate years but I still choose most of my TBR list the same random albeit pointed way. I read books and essays that bring light to topics on which I’m woefully in the dark. I gravitate to authors who show vulnerability. I take heart from the idea they’re struggling with the same or similar things I battle and that we’ll get through them.

As a writer of essays, I try to bring the same things to the fore. In her Skillshare class intro, Roxane Gay says:

“One of the most interesting things that writing essays has shown me is that one person really can make a difference. When you write a good essay, people gravitate toward that work and they tend to start thinking about the world in new and different ways […].”

That’s the best any of us writers can do.

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post Deep Dive into Short Forms: Essays appeared first on DIY MFA.

I bet you love novellas too but don’t realize it. Have you ever read (and loved) any of the following stories:

• “Binti” by Nnedi Okorafor
• “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Truman Capote
• “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley
• “Home” by Toni Morrison
• “The Hound of the Baskervilles” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• “House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros
• “Three Blind Mice” by Agatha Christie
• “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells

If you answered yes to any of the titles, let me welcome you to the novella-lovers club. Don’t be concerned if you’ve always thought of those stories as novels, albeit short ones. Novellas are often marketed as — surprise! — short novels. And that moniker is pretty accurate. In fact, novellas and novelettes dwell in the gap between short stories and novels. 

If you’ve never heard of novelettes, no need to feel alone. Novelette is a new term for me, too. However, I’m firmly on Team Novelette after reading “A Dead Djinn in Cairo” by speculative fiction writer and historian P. Djèlí Clark. (I’ll delve into that novelette and another story, the novella “The Haunting of Tram Car 015”, by Clark a little later in this article.) Novelettes also boast famous titles too. “The Birds” by Daphne Du Maurier is another novelette dubbed differently for a more marketable description. 

Call Me What You Like

Novelettes. Novellas. Short novels. Whatever you call them, as with other short forms, their defining word count is a bit fluid. Generally, novelettes range 7,500 – 17,500 words. Picking up where novelettes end, novellas span 17,500 – 50,000 words. However, different writing organizations publish their own preferential scales of word counts. The Science Fiction Writers of America, sponsor of the Nebula Award, lists a novelette as 7,500-17,500 words and a novella as 17,500 – 40,000 words. The Short Mystery Fiction Society, sponsor of the Derringer Award, only considers novelettes for their award; they place word count for novelettes at 8,001 – 17,500 words.

So, why have they hit the recent popularity jackpot? Ebooks. The format makes them attractive for readers and writers in three ways: brevity, price, discoverability. Novelettes and novellas are quick reads. They’re marketed to readers as free or inexpensive ($0.99 – $2.99). Readers frequently try out new authors by choosing their short stories or novelettes/novellas. (Chances are if you’re an indie romance reader and snagged a freebie or five, you’ve read plenty of novelettes and novellas.) 

Both forms capture the best about novels — an expanded story and a deeper involvement with characters. Timelines, action, and character focus are narrowed and concentrated, consumable in one or two sittings. What that translates into for the reader is more bang for the buck. For writers, they are a perfect vehicle to try out worldbuilding skills; test run plotlines, and develop characters’ backgrounds with a single or simpler story arc.

Portal to Other Forms

P. Djèlí Clark’s novelette “A Dead Djinn in Cairo” and novella “The Haunting of Tram Car 015”, are well-written and delightfully show the forms at their best. Both works share, what Clark describes, “an alternate 1912 Cairo of djinn, airships, & magic” and the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities. 

I think of the stories as one piece because of how well and seamless Clark’s world-building flows between them. Yet they are, each one, so finely constructed that they can easily stand alone. To illustrate this, let’s consider them side-by-side. 

“A Dead Djinn” occurs before “The Haunting” in the timeline of this alternate 1912 Cairo. The worldbuilding introduces readers to a mixture of unusual and magical entities. Clark has them all interacting within the normal human world. He introduces the impetus to this melange in “A Dead Djinn.”

Let’s Read: 

“[…] Thank you, al-Jahiz.”

The last words were mocking, common Cairo slang uttered with praise, sarcasm, or anger. How else to remember al-Jahiz, the famed Soudanese mystic and inventor? Some named him as one and the same with the medieval thinker of Basra, reborn or traveled through time. Sufis claimed he was a herald of the Mahdi; Coptics a harbinger of the apocalypse. Whether genius, saint, or madman, no one could deny that he had shaken the world.

It was al-Jahiz who, through mysticism and machines, bore a hole to the Kaf, the other-realm of the djinn. His purpose for doing so—curiosity, mischief, or malice—remained unknown. He later disappeared, taking his incredible machines with him. Some said even now he traveled the many worlds, sowing chaos wherever he went.”

With al-Jahiz’s interdimensional rending, we are prepared for anything and everything to show up in the stories. In two paragraphs, Clark opens the normal world’s door for djinns and every creature associated with them. In “A Dead Djin,” we find djinns, ghuls, angels and more butted up against clashes within human class systems and gender norms. The first scene opens on a murder scene investigation, complicated because of identity — the victim’s and the lead investigator’s. 

In “The Haunting,” Clark has included, alongside djinns and angels, even more unusual beings mixed in with humans and distinctly human concerns – suffragettes, secret societies, demons, and sentient automatons.       

Both stories offer a unique, almost steampunk view of paranormal-edged technology filled with dirigible airships, trams, copper-plated spectral goggles, and alchemical-filamented lamps. Magic of all kinds has its place too in this world. 

Yet, as exciting as this alternate 1912 Cairo is described, the characters are ultimately the lure that brings readers back to Clark’s stories. Agents Fatma el-Sha’arawi, Hamed Nasr, and Onsi Youssef feel distinct and very much themselves as we encounter their quirks and strengths throughout their adventures,

Let’s Read:

Agent Fatma el-Sha’arawi:

“Agent Fatma el-Sha’arawi stood in his doorway. She was resplendent as ever, in a lavender Englishman’s suit and matching vest with a white shirt and a deep purple tie, topped off with a black bowler no less.  

“Good evening, Agent Hamed,” she greeted him pleasantly. “Am I bothering you?”

“Evening to you, Agent Fatma,” Hamed said, standing and unconsciously straightening his uniform. “And no, not a bother at all. Please, come in.” The smaller woman smiled, strolling in on a pair of black and tan wingtips.”

Agent Hamed Nasr:

“Unfortunately, Agent Hamed Nasr noted with the meticulous eye of an investigator, the superintendent’s contrived attempts at good taste were subsumed under the humdrum tediousness of a mid-level bureaucratic functionary: transit maps and line timetables, mechanical schematics and repair schedules, memorandums and reports, all overlaid one upon another on washed-out yellow walls like decaying dragon scales. They flapped carelessly beneath the air of an oscillating copper fan, its spinning blades rattling inside its cage as if trying to get out. And somehow, still, it was stifling in here, so that Hamed had to resist the urge to pull at the neckband of his white collarless shirt—thankful, at least, that the dark uniform he wore concealed any signs of perspiration in the lingering heat of late-summer Cairo.

[…]

Hamed cleared his throat loudly, coughing into his short moustache. If he had to sit through a conversation about the dried meats of Transcaucasia, he just might go insane. Or be forced to eat his foot. One or the other. And he liked both his sanity and his feet. Catching the superintendent’s attention, he spared a remonstrative glance for Onsi. They were here on Ministry business, not to spend the morning chatting idly like old men at a coffee shop.”

Onsi Youssef:

““My father’s family is Coptic, from right here in Cairo,” Onsi said. He absently ran a finger over the small black cross tattooed onto the inside of his right wrist, while nibbling away at a bit of sudjukh. He’d taken the superintendent up on his offer, making off with almost half the bowl, and had stashed it in his pockets. 

“They live mostly in Shubra, and own a set of candy stores,” he continued. That would explain the man’s sweet tooth, Hamed assessed. “Now, my mother’s family on her father’s side are Copts as well, from down south in Minya—all cotton merchants. Made their wealth when the Americans had their troubles back in the sixties. Her mother, however, was a Nubian from Luxor. That produced quite the scandal, as this was before the religious tolerance laws. At any rate, this is all to say that of course I love Nubian food! My grandmother prepared it for us on feast days—enough for me and all nine of my sisters.””

With a deft hand, Clark makes both novelette and novella feel like reading a short story. Yet, he does so with all the richness and depth of a novel in a fraction of the usual time invested.

Renegade Art

In a culture weighted towards novels, their shorter kin have traditionally gotten less attention. Brooklyn-based independent publisher Melville House has cast their preference for what they call renegade works of art: novellas. They offer a curated collection called The Art of the Novella, which includes classic and lesser-known works by literary greats.

To get a solid start on creating your own novelettes and novellas, consider (re)reading titles from Melville House. Or one or more of the novelettes and novellas listed earlier in this article. Their popularity resurgence has generated plenty of info on craft and technique as well as markets open to both forms:

• 10 Steps to Writing a Novella, Delilah S. Dawson
• Some Notes on the Novella, Ian McEwan, The New Yorker, October 29, 2012
• 33 Publishers and Journals Seeking Novellas, Bookfox/John Fox
• Contests/Prizes: Glimmer Train, Quarterly West, University of Pittsburgh Press’ Drue Heinz Literature Prize
• Other Publishers/Journals: Alaska Quarterly Review, Green Writers Press, Outpost19,  McSweeney’s, The Massachusetts Review’s Working Titles, Seattle Review

As a reader who embraces literature outside most popular trends, I love the idea of reading novelettes and novellas as renegade. Why not join us renegades? Pick up a novelette or novella by a new author. You just might find your next favorite author. And the blueprint for creating your own novelettes and novellas.

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post Deep Dive into Short Forms: Novelettes and Novellas appeared first on DIY MFA.

A certain mystique surrounds this powerful short form genre. Plays, playwriting and the theater are thought of as highbrow. They suffer from the misperception, along with poetry, that a “regular” person may not be able to understand the art form.

Hamilton. Cats. Raisin in the Sun. Les Miserables. Fences. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. 

All titles recognizable to the general public. They are a small grouping of plays that transcend their theatrical beginnings to appeal to a larger, wider audience. 

The Structure of Playwriting

Plays and their varied iterations share much with poetry, its short form kissing cousin. Both make excellent use of an economy of words. A play’s power resides in dialogue and character interaction. A mix of dialogue, stripped down description, and stage direction pushes the audience’s own imagination to fill in what’s not laid out explicitly.  

Plays generally fall into one of four main types – drama, comedy, historical, and musical – but can be constructed in endless variations. They generally are formatted as 10-minute, one-act, full-length or evening-length, and musicals. An oft-repeated caveat for playwrights is one page equals about one minute of stage time. However, script length more accurately reflects the complexity and quantity of the character’s lines, not necessarily the stage time. 

With that said though, a script for a 10-minute play ranges 10 -15 pages. Understandably, script length grows as the play format broadens. One-act plays run 45 – 60 pages, 30 – 60 minutes . Full-length or evening-length plays and musicals run 60 – 100 pages, 90 minutes to two hours.

Plays are divided into three acts. Act I introduces characters, setting, and background information. Act II reveals the play’s central complication(s) and makes up the longest portion of a play. In the last act, Act III the play’s events come to some sort of resolution. 

One-act plays and 10-minute plays are exceptions to the standard three-act play structure. 

Master Class in Playwriting: ‘Night, Mother

‘Night, Mother, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Marsha Norman, is a superb example of a one-act play. The play revolves around two characters, Jessie Cates and Thelma Cates. This daughter-mother duo, respectively, live together in Thelma’s house. Jessie, divorced, is unhappy in her life. She sees no real future for herself, a homebound epileptic, whose son is a thief and a drug addict.  

Norman introduces the central conflict early, within the first six pages, and deftly keeps a current of tension throughout. The curtains open with Thelma Cates on stage eating a last snowball cupcake. She calls her daughter Jessie, who is offstage, to add cupcakes to the grocery list. “We got any old towels?” is Jessie’s response as she joins her mother. Jessie is intent on searching for towels and plastic sheeting. Her responses to her mother’s chatter are distracted but clearly shows their usual Saturday night routine.

Let’s Read: 

JESSIE.  (Continues to search the kitchen cabinets, finding two or three more towels to add to her stack.) It’s not for my hair, Mama. What about some old pillows anywhere or a foam cushion out of a yard chair would be real good.

MAMA. You haven’t forgot what night it is, have you? (Holding up her fingernails.) They’re all chipped, see? I’ve been waiting all week, Jess. It’s Saturday night, sugar.

JESSIE.  I know. I got it on the schedule.

MAMA.  (Crossing to the living room.) You want me to wash ‘em now or are you making your mess first? (Looking at the snowball.) We’re out of these. Did I say that already?

JESSIE.  There’s more coming tomorrow. I ordered you a whole case.

MAMA.  (Checking the TV Guide.) A whole case will go stale, Jessie.

JESSIE.  They can go in the freezer til you’re ready for them. Where’s Daddy’s gun?  

Just a page or so later, Jessie answers Thelma’s questions about why she needs the gun. She matter-of-factly tells Thelma that she plans to kill herself. Jessie explains why she’s telling Thelma: “How would you know if I didn’t say it? You want it to be a surprise? You’re lying there in your bed or maybe you’re just brushing your teeth and you hear this…noise down the hall?”

We easily step into the building tension between Jessie and her mother. Throughout the action, Norman uses running clocks onstage as a countdown of the 90 minutes between the curtain rise and Jessie’s final “‘Night, Mother” before closing her bedroom door. 

Inexorably in those 90 minutes, we uncover the Cates’ personal and familial disappointments. Jessie needs this last night to be between the two of them: “This is private. Dawson (Jessie’s brother) is not invited. I don’t want anybody else over here. Just you and me.” 

There is much for the two of them to discuss, to figure out, and to come to a startlingly imperfect peace about by the play’s end. Norman more than delivers the realistic dialogue and stripped down stage direction plays require to engage the audience’s imagination. 

Like poetry, a play’s efficacy relies solely on its language. Each word and word pairing bear the load of carrying action, tension, and description as well as the characters’ personalities. 

Behind the Scenes

Your first step to keeping current in the world of theater should be visiting the official Tony Awards website, which annually lists nominees and winners of “Best Play”. Another way to learn about playwriting is to explore your local theater. Volunteer behind the scenes. Tryout for a role. Being involved will help you internalize the rhythms of theater and playwriting. And as with all writing, a little eavesdropping as you go about your day is indispensable in creating realistic characters and believable dialogue.

If playwriting is new to you, take a look at the following plays, books, and websites to learn about the theater world, playwriting technique and craft:

• Playbill – Aimed at “Broadway and Off-Broadway theatregoers, providing complete cast and production credits for each show, as well as features articles and columns by and about theatre personalities, entertainment, travel, fashion, and dining.”

• Samuel French – Preeminent publisher of American and British plays and playwrights 

• Tony Awards – Annual award recognizing excellence in Broadway productions and performances, as well as for regional theatre,

• What Playwrights Talk about When They Talk about Writing – Jeffrey Sweet

• Writer’s Digest Screenwriter’s and Playwright’s Market – Chuck Sambuchino (While Writer’s Digest ceased publishing this series in 2011, there is still viable information such as script formatting and terminology for writers exploring playwriting and screenwriting.

•  Variety – A “trusted source of entertainment business news.”

Don’t expect a quick turnaround in writing a play or any short form for that matter.  Short forms require a level of mastery from you that each work in turn will demand anew. 

Lin-Manuel Miranda,  creator of Broadway masterworks In the Heights and Hamilton,  confessed: “It took me seven years to write [Hamilton]. This is no overnight success — took me a year to write the second song in the show ‘my shot.’”

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your hand at playwriting. As a writer, you should always be open to new influences, forms, and language. Write and who knows you might write your own Hamilton. Or, like Shakespeare, have your words transcend the stage to become everyday language as good luck would have it.

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post A Deep Dive into Short Forms: Playwriting appeared first on DIY MFA.

Last month at the Looking Glass Rock Writers Conference, I rediscovered mystery and revelation in familiar territory—poetry. All thanks to my instructor, multi-disciplinary artist and poet Frank X Walker. He introduced his verse love—historical poetry—by querying us about an iconic bit of history: George Washington and his teeth. We talked about what we “knew” and what was true historically. Which led to an ingenious writing prompt and what I consider the most powerful writing I’ve done this year. But first, what is historical poetry?

Historical Poetry: Making the Invisible Visible

Historical poetry is a subgenre of poetry incorporating history and historical with verse. Often associated with persona poems, the genre generally uses a first-person voice separate from the author and is narrative in tone. It can vary in length from a single poem to a series of linked thematic or persona poems to one book-length poem.

Poets Marilyn Nelson, Campbell McGrath, and Frank X Walker provide excellent contemporary examples of historical poetry. In her Newbery Award-winning book, Carver: A Life in Poems, Nelson helps readers see a fuller picture of George Washington Carver than just the man who discovered 300 uses for the peanut.

Interestingly enough, the Corps of Discovery or The Lewis and Clark Expedition provided the little-known heroes of books by both McGrath and Walker. McGrath’s book-length poetic narrative, Shannon, centers around 18-year-old George Shannon and the 16 days he went missing from the expedition. Walker penned two books about York, Clark’s personal slave: Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York and When Winter Comes: The Ascension of York. In both, through persona poems, York tells the story of the infamous Lewis & Clark expedition and his personal journey—inner and outer.

Using historical poetry, specifically persona poems, these poets blend history and art to illuminate the lives and humanity of these figures. They make the invisible visible.

All the Truth

After talking about the artifacts—two sets of Washington’s false teeth—that remain and what history recorded, Walker invited us to write about Washington and his teeth but from a different or unusual perspective. By doing so, we were pushed to experience history in a new way. Pushed, in Emily Dickinson’s words, to “[t]ell all the truth but tell it slant.”

Walker is no stranger to the idea of writing from an unusual perspective. One poem, “One-Third of 180 Grams of Lead” from his book, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, has a most remarkable narrator, the bullet that killed Medgar Evers. In the poem, he captures the best of persona and historical poetry.

Let’s Read:

“ […] Before I rocketed through

the smoking barrel hidden in the honeysuckle,

before I tore through a man’s back and shattered

his family and a window glass, before I bounced

off a refrigerator and a coffeepot, before I landed

at my destined point in history, next to a watermelon.”

Here the “I” is a fully-formed persona, dispassionately recounting its journey from gun to its landing spot “next to a watermelon”. The litany of each station along its flight distances readers from the act of violence. It also is an effective rendering to highlight the monstrosity of what is happening before us.

“ […] praying

that he not miss, then sending me to deliver a message,

as if the woman screaming in the dark or the children

at her feet could ever believe that bullets could hate.”

The poem’s events are grounded in fact—the bullet’s trajectory, the shooter’s racial hatred. Yet, Walker’s use of the bullet as narrator underlines, without histrionics, the evil hatred works. The bullet, this “I” persona, is not taken in by the clandestine nature of the shooter’s act. Nor does it assign that same gullibility to Myrlie Evers and the children: “as if the woman…the children….could ever believe that bullets could hate.” It knows, as we readers know, that hatred resides in the shooter.

Walker’s ingenuity of view and investigation into fact inspired us workshop members. Some wrote of Washington’s teeth from the POV of a blacksmithing tool preparing to extract a slave’s teeth or an enslaved parent of a young child whose teeth were taken. I wrote of the imagined glee of George Washington’s stomach at the promise of a new set of dentures:

New Teeth for The Father of His Country: The First Stomach Rejoices

“By Cash pd Negroes for 9 Teeth on Acct of Dr. Lemoire” – Ledger notation by Lund Washington (cousin and estate manager of George Washington), Mount Vernon plantation, Account Book dated May 1784.

I rumble much satisfaction
at welcoming my new mouth
yes    yes a gleeful day
indeed this is a day
of rejoicing    think of it
glorious hunks of sustenance
steaks   the roundedness
of cow   marinating tallow
of lamb   that tender gamy
taste of wilderness
carrots    ah yes, carrots   
much longed for and necessary
I am not just for wallowing
in blood     earth too has flesh
the lofty meats of armed giants
Mississippi nuts   walnuts chestnuts  
I bother not for the where of it
these teeth   tools for my enjoyment 
or the how they come to me    anyone 
so easily dispossessed of the wealth
of these ivoried treasures
affirm I am the better owner 
I care only for the filling
of my emptiness   enough  
I say   of the mush of babes 
and the infirm     I care only
for the meats soon to be mine
right and proper spoils 
for commander-in-chief

Fact of the Matter

Writing historical poetry is not just slipping a few ‘facts’ in a poem. It actually begins with research and fact-checking. If you’re unsure about what research and fact-checking entails, I recommend you visit your local library. You can make an appointment for a library tour with a reference librarian. They can tailor their tour to cover the subject/time period your poem will cover. They can also help you develop research strategies to make your search more efficient and help you avoid fake or false facts. Historical/genealogical groups and libraries are also excellent places to visit for reputable historical information.

If you’re a more DIY-type of person or are short on time, start with the International Fact-Checking Day website. It provides information and research techniques to discern real facts from fake. While the site’s aim is to help users avoid fake political news, it includes an online course to develop basic fact-checking skills and info on critical thinking.

If historical poetry is new to you, I suggest reading the following books and websites for technique, craft and enjoyment:

• International Fact-Checking Day: https://factcheckingday.com/
• Southwestern University’s Guide for Writing in History: https://www.southwestern.edu/live/files/4173-guide-for-writing-in-historypdf
• Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: by Campbell McGrath
• Carver: A Life in Poems: by Marilyn Nelson
• Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers: poems: by Frank X Walker
• Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York: by Frank X Walker
• When Winter Comes: The Ascension of York: by Frank X Walker

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post Deep Dive into Short Forms: Historical Poetry appeared first on DIY MFA.

Flash is one of my not-so-secret literary short forms loves. I love it for the same reasons I love poetry. Done right, flash conjures a lingering image, emotion, or a world with just a few well-placed words.

Brevity and distillation are the hallmarks of the form. Description, carefully chosen to evoke character, setting, time and place, works as the center point for any flash piece. Of course, flash doesn’t give the writer much room to work storytelling magic.

Let’s take a look at the term “flash” and its characteristics. Flash actually refers to a story’s length, which usually falls between 6 – 2,000 words. Published flash pieces range between 300 and 1,000 words. It’s likely you’ve read flash fiction under other names, which correspond to the story’s length:

• Flash fiction: 6 – 2000 words
• Sudden fiction: up to 750 words
• Drabble, or microfiction: up to 100 words
• Dribble, or minisaga: up to 50 words
• Twitterature: up to 280 characters
• Six-word story

With its compactness, it’s no wonder flash fiction is described as “one part story, one part poem.”   

Part Story, Part Poem

A story traditionally has five elements: character(s), setting, plot, conflict, and resolution. Poetry, at its most spare, juggles three: form, sound, and imagery. Flash fiction balances, or tries to balance, some mixture of all of these.

With such little space to tell a story, flash fiction writers create works that surprise, startle or intrigue—from beginning to end. They have little time to mind their storytelling manners. They often rely heavily on one or two of these elements.

Likable, an interesting jewel of a story by Deb Olin Unferth, works this monocular focus to its advantage. The story is spare; it has no dialogue. What it lacks in setting, it more than compensates with character.

Likable is all character. Through the focus on character, Olin Unferth more than delivers the story’s conflict and resolution. Though interestingly enough, Olin Unferth never describes the main (and only) character physically. We are simply told the unnamed main character is a woman in the story’s opening.

Let’s Read:

“She could see she was becoming a thoroughly unlikable person. Each time she opened her mouth she said something ugly, and whoever was nearby liked her a little less. These could be strangers, these could be people she loved, or people she knew only slightly whom she had hoped would one day be her friends.”

We learn she is unlikeable and why; in the story’s last paragraph, we are told that she is forty-one.

“Or had she become less likable simply by growing older—so that she might be doing the same thing she always did, but because she was now forty-one, not twenty, it had become unlikable because any woman doing something at forty-one is more unlikable than a woman doing it at twenty?”

Olin Unferth uses also the poetic element of form in the piece. Although the story runs only 331 words, she uses long lines or sentences to set the story’s tone.

All forward motion in Likeable comes from those long sentences. It also comes from the effect of her (our unnamed main character) unlikeability on the world she inhabits.

Initially, when reading fiction, we expect a traditional story form. In Likeable’s form, the story length and the character’s unlikeability push us along. Despite ourselves, we want to know what happens to her.

In flash fiction, we, as readers, can expect writers to construct non-traditional stories. We, as writers, should exploit the form’s small stage to experiment. We should eagerly exploit the opportunity inseparable from flash to create new versions of our stories.

Resources

If flash fiction is new to you, I suggest reading the following books and magazines for technique, craft, and practice:

• The New Yorker – https://www.newyorker.com/

• 100 Word Story Magazine – Grant Faulkner, editor https://www.100wordstory.org/

• The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction – Tara L. Masih, editor https://rosemetalpress.com/books/the-rose-metal-press-field-guide-to-writing-flash-fiction/

• SmokeLong Quarterly – https://www.smokelong.com/

• wigleaf: (very) short fiction – https://wigleaf.com/

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post Deep Dive into Short Forms: Flash Fiction appeared first on DIY MFA.

Brevity is the bedrock of writing flash. I consider flash writing forms as cousins to poetry. Grant Faulkner, the editor of the literary magazine 100 Word Story, describes flash similarly: “I think of flash fiction as being one part story, one part poem.” Flash shares the same mandate as poetry—brevity and distillation. Like poetry, every word counts. Its collective hybrid forms rely on the importance of description carefully chosen to evoke character, setting, time and place.

To understand the literary hydra that is flash, let’s dip into its many faces, names, and word counts. Generally, flash encompasses both fiction and nonfiction. It straddles the line between poetry and longer fiction. Between poetry and long-form creative nonfiction.

The term “flash” refers to the form’s length, which can vary anywhere from six to 2,000 words. Most published flash falls between 300 to 1,000 words. Flash nonfiction, specifically, usually runs between 500 to 1,000 words.

Flash fiction goes by multiple names—microfiction, short-shorts, quick fiction, immediate fiction, and sudden fiction—and rambles through a variety of genres. Flash nonfiction focuses on memoir, essay, and factual writing. It’s also called by more than one name, such as micro essay, flash creative nonfiction, and flash memoir.

At this point, you’re probably expecting me to discuss boring specificities like point-of-view requirements—first person, second person, or third person omniscient. Not so much. Although flash nonfiction is all about the facts, there’s more to it than that. That’s what makes flash nonfiction so exciting.

We read fiction to be transported; we read nonfiction to be amazed. After all, what’s more astonishing than life? The only specificity about flash nonfiction is writing what’s true, writing what’s factual, while using fiction-writing techniques and a poet’s sensibility. Telling the truth with flair.

Where There’s Flash, There’s Flair

A single theme, metaphor, or decisive action becomes the lens a poet uses to lead readers into their poem. In Niya Marie’s The Black Hairstory Lesson, I’m reminded how true that is, too, for flash nonfiction. She uses the ritual of haircare and its place in Black culture as the lens to tell her history or hairstory. In a mere 715 words, she unspools beauty shop culture, pop culture, and her evolving sense of self.

She begins sometime between “the year micro-braided, brokenhearted girls sang Ashanti” and “the year triple-X-tee’d boys-will-be-boys broke down the name of Osama bin Laden”.  Her hairstory frames the relationship with her first and last boyfriend and her personal evolution.

Let’s read:

“He was City Blue down to the socks. Cords of muscle coiled like concertina wire under his brick-brown skin. Irises like dollops of burnt sugar would melt the size-2 Baby Phat right off my peekaboo hips. Whenever his mother worked a double at the hospital, I’d be in her kitchen baking brownies in nothing but a wife beater, just to show her son I could be that girl, his girl, the girl latched onto a boy’s hip as if she’d sprung from it. I wasn’t his first, but I was determined to be his last. I kept my straightened hair shiny as a new penny and swooped it over my left eye like Aaliyah. I got a touch-up every six weeks to mirror the girls who’d come before me and keep pace with the ever eager next-ups.”

That short passage crackles with imagery and is full of detail: City Blue, Baby Phat, Aaliyah, straightened hair and a touch-up. All chosen to best set the scene of urban African-American teens.

For me, Marie’s words sing most true when she describes the transformation of her hair into an artificial sleekness:

“The point of her rattail comb would needle my scalp as she cleaved through sheaves of my blown out hair. I inhaled a flurry of scents: the hair care aisle’s ethnic section uncorked; baby powder, Muslim smell-goods; the bitterness of he-ain’t-shit blues, the sweetness of he-put-it-down arias; smoking metal heated just shy of incandescence; and the lingering pungency of relaxer.”

“Once pleased with the geometry of her parts, Ms. Jackie would relieve the stove of its iron. I’d hear the clink-clink-clank of catch and release, and feel her cooling breath chasing the blackened barrel down the length of my hair. After an hour or three, my strands—lovingly cooked into submission—would cascade over my shoulders like chiffon.”

Marie highlights a unique slice of Black hair culture and, at the same time, evokes a universal moment of female beauty culture.  

Freedom Without, Freedom Within

Flash’s allure is in its brevity and utter openness to other genres. Poets and fiction writers can easily transfer their skills to this different but related form. This makes Marie’s deft use of language—her word choice and its musicality—understandable. About her work overall, she says: “I fancied myself a fiction writer until I encountered a genre-queer called creative nonfiction.”

In The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, Dinty W. Moore instructs writers on creating their own pieces:

“The brief essay, in other words, needs to be hot from the first sentence, and the heat must remain the entire time. My fire metaphor […] does not refer to incendiary subject matter. The heat might come from language, from image, from voice or point-of-view, from revelation or suspense, but there must always be a burning urgency of some sort, translated through each sentence, starting with the first.”

Resources

If flash nonfiction is new to you, I suggest reading the following books and magazines to get started:

• Brevity Magazine —  Dinty W. Moore, editor
• Creative Nonfiction Magazine —  Lee Gutkind, editor  
• Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction —  Lee Gutkind, editor
• 100 Word Story Magazine — Grant Faulkner, editor
• The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction — Dinty W. Moore, editor

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post Deep Dive into Short Forms: Flash Nonfiction appeared first on DIY MFA.

Poets are alchemists. We transform the chaos of everyday life into sonnets and haikus, into verses of order. We name the unnameable. We create small spaces in which to catch our collective breaths.

Pretty cool job description, huh? Lofty, definitely, and well worth the effort that an active poetry-writing practice demands.

Our aim, as poets, is to simplify the complex. The excitement of naming the unnameable draws us, again and again, to the page. We begin by stringing words, simple and musical, on screen or paper.

Poetry requires us to manipulate those words—through condensing and compressing specific events or emotions—into something universally relatable. However, much of our early attempts at poetry will miss the mark.  Much of it, I hate to admit, will veer into triteness or sentimentality.

So, how does one avoid writing superficially? You can’t. At least, not at first. It’s an unavoidable stage in our development as poets. But our time of surface writing can be shortened by the writing, reading, and close study of poems. No one of these is more important than the other. A good poet must do all three.

Writing poetry regularly, and varying our subjects, forms, and language, builds our confidence on the page. It offers us the satisfaction of seeing our work outside our imaginations. Reading widely in poetry (and fiction) gives us a sense of what’s possible in our own poetry writing practice. However, it is in the close reading of a well-constructed poem where we get to see poetic alchemy up close.

Up Close and Personal

Actors understand the importance of knowing a role intimately. They study the character’s habits, strengths, and weaknesses. All to enhance their performances. So too should we poets. We study the work of others to understand the nuances of using language, form, and subjects in specific ways.

One poem, The News Reported She Wore Her Body to the Event by Amy Key, offers a perfect marriage of form and simplicity of language to highlight her subject. In a 2017 interview with The Poetry Extension founder Natalya Anderson, Key said in writing the collection Isn’t Forever in which the poem was printed, she wanted “to shine a light on elements of femininity that might be dismissed as froth—wanting to fit in with feminine ideals but fighting against them”. The poem itself addresses body image, loneliness, and feelings of rejection for not having society’s ideal feminine body.

Key takes this weighty subject in hand by using a simple palate of words: she, her, body, sun. She lets them stand on their own without fuss. As the poem gathers momentum, Key begins to seed the poem with longer, heavier words: slovenliness, coalition, consensus. These breaks from unadorned language are used to highlight the impact of societal pressure, for Key to “sweep off that top layer of the shimmery language and be more direct, more brutal and somehow more tender with it.” Her use of buoyancy in the next to the last line of the poem brings that tenderness to the poem and the reader.

Let’s read:

Excerpts from “The News Reported She Wore Her Body to the Event”, Amy Key, from Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe Books)

The poem’s form creates tension with its lines crossing over and back again. It brings to mind a corset and with it the idea of restraining the body, the projection of desire onto that body.

The lines, while constrained, begin simply enough with  “she carried herself in her body.” In the poem’s middle, Key writes “the crowd couldn’t decide/if her body was too much/or too little/some demanded that her body amend itself.”

Key constructs the poem around a schism running through the center. Fittingly, she closes it in the last lines as the poem’s protagonist realizes that to live she must embrace all of her self.

Key’s use of craft and art is very much on display in this poem. She weaves subject, word choice and poetic form to bring a complex topic and its nuances down to a strikingly readable form.

The work Key does with and in this poem brings to mind a remark on poets and poetry by U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. In Episode 28: On Kindness of The Slowdown, her new poetry podcast, she reflects on what poetry offers to readers and what is required from the poet.

Smith speaks, in her thoughtful manner, of poetry’s generosity—the beauty it uncovers—but also of the poet’s necessity to do work beyond the surface, to bear witness and sit in life’s difficult places:

“I’m not just talking about wowing the reader with beautiful or vivid language. But rather a willingness to think about what is at stake and to push past what is merely safe. To really and truly dwell for a while in the heart or the meat of the matter. The place in the poem where actual need sits.”

This is where we poets start to acquire depth. We gather our words and put them to work, mingling forms and language. We spend time pondering them and the heart of what birthed them. We learn in those hours how to bear witness. I can think of no better calling.

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post Deep Dive into Short Forms: Poetry appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today’s show is our last episode of 2018 so Happy New Year everybody!

And this episode is an especially awesome one because it features three members of my awesome DIY MFA team. I am so excited to have DIY MFA columnists Melanie Marttila, Brenda Joyce Patterson, and Stacy Woodson on the show!

I also want to take a moment to mention that these three amazing women are only a tiny sample of the awesome members of DIY MFA. We currently have 21 members on our team, from columnists who contribute articles to people who work their magic maintaining our archives and helping to curate all the voices we feature on our site. So a big thank you to all the members of the team for another awesome year!

Now, let me introduce the three amazing ladies I’ll be chatting with in this interview.

Melanie Marttila is a certified corporate trainer by day and fantasy writer by night. She writes the DIY MFA column Speculations, which is all about science fiction and fantasy. Her own works of scifi and fantasy have appeared in several places such as Bastion Science Fiction Magazine and On Spec Magazine.

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her column at DIY MFA, Writing Small, focuses on the various different short forms of writing such as short stories, poetry, and essays. She is a mentee in the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Writer to Writer Mentorship Program for Fall 2018—which is a very prestigious and selective mentoring program—and her poetry and flash fiction have been published in numerous literary magazines such as Vayavya. She has also had a travel essay published (along with works by Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks) in the anthology Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

Stacy Woodson writes crime fiction and is the columnist behind Hook, Line, and Dagger, which dives into all things thriller and mystery. She is a U.S. Army veteran and memories of her time in the military are a source of inspiration for her writing. Stacy is a Daphne du Maurier winner and a Killer Nashville Claymore finalist. She also has several short fiction pieces forthcoming in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Malice Domestic’s Mystery Most Edible, and Chesapeake Crimes: Invitation to Murder.

Didn’t I tell you my team was amazing?!?! But I’ll stop gushing and let you hear from these fabulous women themselves. So listen in as Melanie, Brenda, Stacy and I chat about the aspects of genre writing and give you a sneak peek at the behind-the-scenes of DIY MFA.

In this episode Melanie, Brenda, Stacy and I discuss:

• An inside look at the Speculations, Writing Small, and Hook, Line, and Dagger columns.
• The different conventions within genres and writing forms.
• Why reading with purpose in your genre is so important.
• Pitfalls to avoid when writing thriller, scifi/fantasy, and short forms.
• Book recommendations to help you dive into each of their genres.

Plus, all these lovely ladies’ #1 tip for writers.

About Melanie Marttila

During the day, Melanie is a certified (insert joke-of-choice here) corporate trainer, and by night she is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She writes the DIY MFA column Speculations which is all about science fiction and fantasy.

You can find her short science fiction in Bastion Science Fiction Magazine (“The Broken Places,” June 2014), On Spec Magazine (“Downtime,” Fall 2014), and Sudbury Ink (“Cicadas” and “Molly Finder,” 2016).

To connect with Melanie check out her website melaniemarttila.ca.

And you can read Melanie’s most recent Speculations article here.

About Brenda Joyce Patterson

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. She is a mentee in the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Writer to Writer Mentorship Program for Fall 2018. She writes the column, Writing Small, for DIY MFA extolling poetry and short stories, literature’s mild-mannered superheroes.

Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Also, along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay, “The Kindness of Strangers”, appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure published by Eighth Mountain Press in 1997.

To connect with Brenda check out her website at brendajoycepatterson.com.

And you can read Brenda’s most recent Writing Small article here.

About Stacy Woodson

Stacy Woodson is a crime fiction writer as well as a U.S. Army veteran, and memories of her time in the military are a source of inspiration for her stories. She is a Daphne du Maurier winner for best romantic suspense, in the single-title, unpublished category and a Killer Nashville Claymore finalist. She reviews books for Publishers Weekly, and writes the column Hook, Line, and Dagger for DIY MFA which dives into the thriller and mystery genre.

Her short fiction will appear in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in 2019, as well as in two forthcoming anthologies: Malice Domestic’s Mystery Most Edible from Wildside Press also due out in 2019, and Chesapeake Crimes: Invitation to Murder due out from Wildside Press in 2020.

To connect with Stacy check out her website at www.stacywoodson.com.

And you can read Stacy’s most recent Hook, Line, and Dagger article here.

Link to Episode 232

(Right-click to download.)

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 232: Behind the Scenes of DIY MFA’s Genre Columns — Interview with Melanie Marttila, Brenda Joyce Patterson, and Stacy Woodson appeared first on DIY MFA.