Second Rule for Literary Magazine Submissions: Manuscript Editing

This maybe should have been the first rule in literary magazine submissions because before you need to worry about developing a system (see my post of May 27), you need to have a great piece of writing ready to submit. Once you’ve got the content to be the very best you can make it, you need to polish your prose and iron out all the kinks so that you’re putting your best foot forward. Here are my steps:

1.       Spell check. Obvious point maybe, but often overlooked. Not running spell check and having any kind of typo in your manuscript that Spell Check would have found is sloppy!

2.       Read your manuscript out loud to yourself. Any spot that you stumble over while reading needs smoothing out. This also helps you find overused words.

3.       Have someone else read your manuscript out loud to you. This person will actually read what you have written, rather than what you think you wrote, something that is almost impossible for the writer to do after working on a text for a long time. This is also great way to catch misused homophones, or words that are spelled correctly but that are not the right words, something Spell Check won’t do for you.

4.       Do a word search for commonly misspelled words such as “you’re” vs. “your,” or “its” vs. “it’s” and look closely at each instance that comes up to make sure it is correct.

5.       Do a word search for your word ticks. You should know what they are. For instance, I like to start sentences with “And” which in most cases is not appropriate. So I do a word search on “. And” to catch them.

6.       Do a word search for filler words you like to use, such as “just” or “very.” In most instances, you should omit them.

7.       Do a word search for “ly” as this will help you weed out adverbs. See if you can’t drop some of them or replace them with stronger verbs. This will make your prose smoother and more impactful.

8.       Insert page numbers.

9.       Make sure your name is on the manuscript unless the publication you’re submitting to wants to read blindly (this is often the case with contests).

Do you have any steps to add?

Blog Word Cloud

For day 30 of the Blogathon we're taking it easy: Today's theme is to create a word cloud for our blog, so here's what Wordle came up with for mine:

Do you notice that the one word that should be prominent for this blog is missing?

Literary Life - Attend Literary Festivals

Another way to pursue a literary life is to attend a literary festival. In Chicago, the Printers Row Literary Festival is coming up next weekend (June 4-5), offering lots of book browsing, readings, and discussions with authors. Unfortunately for me it happens on the same weekend as the 57th Street Art Fair in my own neighborhood, and I have a long-standing tradition of attending that with good old friends. But maybe I can split myself this year!

In any case, check out the Printers Row schedule if you're in Chicago and attend an event or two. If you're not in Chicago, and I realize most of my readers are not, let me know what literary festivals are happening in your neighborhoods! I don't mind drooling over events I can't go to!

Note from Charlotte: Visiting Niki de Saint Phalle

Last weekend I was in Charlotte, NC for the alumni conference of the Queens MFA Program in Creative Writing, and I made a point of swinging by downtown and the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art to see their outdoor exhibit of sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle. I've been a fan of her work ever since I first saw an exhibit of her work in Munich in 1987. So I was quite thrilled to be able to see and especially touch some scupltures of her again, this time in the heart of Charlotte's downtown.

One thing I love about her work is that you can interact with them. This skull is hollow and you can walk into its left ear and look out through its teeth. Little kids think that is especially cool.

Here you can see, I hope, how tactile the surface of this mother-child sculpture is - it's wonderful to run your fingers over the glassy round stones that are embedded into the cement.









I love this juxtaposition of skyscrapers and mirrored funky sun head:

Here, one last look: the skull in the background, and Louis Armstrong in the foreground.

First Rule for Literary Magazine Submissions: Develop a System

As an aspiring literary writer, you sooner or later need to submit your writing to literary magazines if you want to get published. Having a system helps:

1.       Develop two lists:

a.       One is your personal ranking of literary magazines where you’d like to get published. Make sure to read magazines beforehand to see if you like the work they publish. Chances are that if you like their selections, they might like your work. Feel free to refer to my list of best, second and third best literary magazines for nonfiction if you write memoir or personal essay. But remember it reflects my take on that world; your take might be quite different. For fiction writers, Cliff Garstang publishes yearly rankings of Pushcart prize winning literary magazines on his blog Perpetual Folly. Rank the magazines by putting those first where you’d love to be published and would kick yourself if you didn’t at least try them first.

b.      The second list is your submissions log where you note when you have sent what piece to which magazine. This allows you to work towards a submissions goal (x number of submissions per year, for example), gives you a place to note rejections and follow up with magazines who have not responded within a reasonable amount of time (usually 6 months). Once your work is accepted, refer to your log to withdraw it from any other magazines you submitted it to. My submissions log is set up in Excel. Email me if you’d like a copy to get started and put "submissions log" in the subject line.

2.       Submit your best piece, the one you’ve polished many times and are sure is the best it can be, to the first ten (or five, or whatever you’re comfortable with) magazines on your list, and enter these submissions in your log.

3.       When the majority of these ten magazines have rejected it, don’t be sad but pat yourself on the back that you’re out there, and send your piece to the next ten on your ranking list. Aim for five to ten submissions that you’re waiting to hear from. That way you stay in the mix.

4.       Work your way down your ranking list, always checking magazines’ websites before you submit as reading periods can change.

5.       Believe in your writing and keep sending your piece out. Don’t make changes to it unless you get feedback from an editor that resonates with you.

Sooner or later, most pieces get accepted. There are many literary magazines out there, and the market changes all the time. Visit newpages.com to get the newest info and reviews on literary magazines.

Second and Third Best Literary Magazines for Nonfiction

Blogger restored my post that fell victim to their May 12 outage, so here it is again: Adding to my listing of the best literary magazines for nonfiction, following are the second and third tier in my personal ranking. Magazines are listed alphabetically within their tier. Second tier contains magazines that have earned three honorable mentions in either the Pushcart 2011 or 2010 anthologies, or were listed for a notable essay in Best American Essays in 2010 and prior years. Third tier contains magazines that earned two such listings. Again, I am not listing some very fine magazines because they do not accept simultaneous submissions, see my rationale for that here.

Second Tier:

New England Review

Water~Stone Review


Third Tier:

A Public Place

Arts & Letters

Bellevue Literary Review

Boulevard

Brain, Child

Colorado Review

Ecotone

Florida Review

Gulf Coast

Memoir (and)

Narrative Magazine

New Ohio Review

Passages North

The Journal

The Pinch Journal

Under the Sun

Writing Exercise: Sounds of Rain

View from the window behind my writing
couch this morning - see how the water
is pouring from the spout?

What words to use describe the sound of rain? We had terrific rains this morning in Chicago, the kind that darken the sky at 8 in the morning. Since I love the sound of rain, I started to think about words that capture that sound: That pitter patter on the pavement, that pouring out of the rooftop spout, that drumming on the window. Listen in here to a "sound sculpture" of falling rain if you feel like it.

Needless to say, this is one of my exercises in writing with the senses, in helping us create a three-dimensional world with words, especially through strong verbs.

Here's my beginning list of rain sounds, but please help me out and add to it:

babble
drip
drop
drum
gurgle
pour
slap
slosh
splatter

Where I Write

Today's Blogathon topic is "My 5 Favorite Places to Write." However, I only have one favorite place to write: my couch. In the photo I'm leaning forward, probably because my back was hurting, but I usually sit in that right corner of the couch, my feet up on the leather ottoman with my laptop on my lap (that's why it's a laptop, right?). The picture was taken in January when the couch's leather is cool so I spread an afghan over it.

I used to write at my desk (seen in the background) that stands in our sunporch but it has now become the spot where I do family admin, prepare for my classes, or work on a photobook. My couch is where I write. I have a side table where I put my cup of coffee, keep my writing log, and stack other materials related to current writing projects.

Of course I write in other places, too, that's why I carry my notebook. But I feel most at home with myself when I plop down on that couch. I think it is crucial to have a dedicated place where you write, and where you are surrounded with materials for your writing. That's why artists have studios, and why you get a studio when you're at a writing residency. Creating that physical space and keeping it for that one purpose helps you to get into the writing frame of mind.

Do you have a dedicated place to write?

Writing Is My SecondAct

Thank you, Michelle Rafter, for featuring my blog on SecondAct, the online magazine for people reinventing themselves after 40.

I have to admit I never quite saw myself as engineering a second act because it was, in the end, seamless. I laid the foundation for my career in writing many years ago by taking my very first writing class online at writers.com. This was after a 2002 trip to my grandparents' hometown in the Czech Republic that left me unsettled and bursting with insights that I needed to explore. And writing is my way of exploring and examining (read the resulting essay here). I thought that fell into the category of travel writing, thus I was taking that travel writing class. But the purpose of that class in my life turned out to be meeting people like Joyce Finn introduced me to a dedicated online writing group. That companionship and prodding led to my pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte. I wanted to take my writing to the next level, and I wanted to have the credentials to teach, should I need to find a different kind of employment.

I earned my MFA degree while working in corporate consulting, having three grade school kids, and serving as board president of my kids' school. The MFA helped me get my dream job of teaching memoir writing at StoryStudio Chicago, and I initially did that along with everything else, rushing to my classes straight from the office. The degree also helped me land gigs as an English composition instructor at various colleges.

Clearly I had prepared for the second act and when, three years ago, I had reached the end of the corporate road (cliché, I know, but clichés work some time), I already had a second leg to stand on. While it was incredibly hard to leave corporate life, after all, 15 years is a long time, and I had many wonderful colleagues and clients to say good bye to, I knew it was the right thing to do. I could not envision myself as a cubicle dweller in my 50s but I can see myself as a writer in my 70s or 80s. So, here I am, and apparently blogging is going to be a big part of that second act even though I did not see that coming three years ago.

Reading: Envying Gerald Durrell

If you’d like to take a break from dark and heavy memoirs and read one that is light yet literary; or if you wouldn’t mind spending time on a sun-drenched Greek island but don’t have the time or means, then read Gerald Durrell’s memoirs about his childhood in Corfu.

My memoir group and I were in exactly that mood last spring. Bogged down by reading memoirs about death, depression and illness, we resolved to read funnier, upbeat books over the summer, and of all the books we read last year, including the darker ones, Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals was my favorite.

This surprised me because I am not a big animal lover, and this book is all about 10-year-old Gerry discovering the wild life of Corfu. However, his accounts are so whimsical, comical and light-handed, and his prose so gorgeous that I loved the book. Anyone who can come up with a phrase like “the headlight raked along the veranda briefly” to describe the sweep of a car’s lights at night is a prose genius, and a master of the strong verb.

I went on to read the sequel Birds, Beasts and Relatives, dog-earing many pages for their gems of prose. Here is one: “The first course that Demetrious-Mustapha set before us was a fine, clear soup, sequined with tiny golden bubbles of fat…” Who would think of sequins when describing fat droplets on a soup’s surface? It makes me drool with envy!

Durrel’s Corfu Trilogy (I’m currently reading Garden of the Gods which is only available second hand) is ideal bedtime reading (which is where I read most of the time) because it is written in episodes. You can pick it up anytime, and read a page or two without having to recover where you were at. And yet I got invested enough in the cast of characters of his family to want to read on, to find out what adventures befell them, or how they extracted themselves from a mishap.

As one of my students confirmed, My Family and Other Animals also gave us a whole new appreciation for the natural world. Due to this book, she was, all of a sudden, amused by the web one spider was spinning outside of her high rise office window, and she got really worried when the window washers came by (the spider survived). Just this morning, as I was walking to work, I spotted an earthworm and was reminded how little Gerry would have collected it to feed it to one of the birds he was keeping.

One interesting tidbit as we come off the Greg Mortenson memoir scandal: Gerald Durrell didn’t take the truth too literally himself. When you check out his bio on Wikipedia, you’ll find that his famous novelist brother Larry didn’t live with the family in the villa as in the story, but was married and living in town. I expect Durrell would have been roasted for that in our day and age, and given the charm of this book, I wonder whether we are taking it all too seriously these days.

Formulaic Writing

The one insight gleaned from today’s seminars at the Queens MFA alumni conference, courtesy of Alan Michael Parker who was talking about taking risks in writing: Most plots, especially in TV these days, follow the formula:

Childhood + Trauma = Protagonist

It made me laugh out loud because not only do many TV series follow that formula, often hidden in a subplot, but many memoirs do, too. Formulas work, of course, but they can also get boring. Fresh and original writing surprises the reader. So even if you’re dealing with a story that seems formulaic, it is important to be aware of the formula, and to ask yourself: Where lies the surprise?

Read the Old Masters to Steer Clear of Period Style

My greatest insight today from the Queens MFA alumni conference: William Butler Yeats apparently advised a young poet who had sent him some of her poems to read and study lots of dead poets rather than contemporary ones. Reason? You don’t want to pick up too much of the current period style because you don’t have enough perspective on it to realize that it’s a certain way of writing. And you don’t want to sound like everyone else who’s writing in your time. Read and absorb the old masters to freshen up your own style, to see what else is possible.

Thank you, Morri Creech, for sharing this insight during your seminar on Sound Across Genres – you’ve given me another argument for why I make my students read classic memoirs, in addition to contemporary ones. So the question to my readers is: What are some of the memoirs you consider classics?

Note from Savannah

My shot of the outside of the synagogue. I love the mix of
palm trees and live oak!

Today a short note from my travels: I spent the early afternoon in Savannah, Georgia, mainly to have lunch with a former client from my corporate consulting days, and also to visit the third oldest Jewish congregation in the U.S., Mickve Israel and their neo-Gothic synagogue that to me looks like a church. Being Reform, it even has an organ. The building itself was completed in 1878, at the height of the Victorian era when neo-Gothic was all the rage. The congregation, however, dates back to 1733.

Proof that this is not a church: Search for the
Star of David in the upper part of the window

The inside of the synagogue features stunning colored glass windows, the likes of which I have not seen in other synagogues.

Of course I walked around downtown Savannah as well and fell in love with those stately live oak trees and the Spanish moss! How lovely to walk through those shady squares and take snapshots of all those old homes with their wrought-iron lattice work. It was a short stopover as I had to head back to Charlotte to attend the alumni conference and 10th anniversary celebration of my MFA in Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte. I'm in the Queen's city now, but thank you, Savannah, for a charming interlude. I'm glad I stopped by!

Submissions: Consider Markets Outside of the U.S.

View from my bedroom
at Joyce's house

I’m currently visiting my longtime writer friend Joyce Finn in her sunny paradise in Sun City Hilton Head, South Carolina. We met many years ago in an online travel writing class, and Joyce still runs an online writing group that we founded in 2004. Keeping any writers group going for that long is a huge success, and speaks volumes to Joyce’s skill as a moderator. One of the neat things about her group is that it brings together writers from all corners of the world, and one of Joyce’s invaluable insights is that if you write in English, you should consider markets outside of the U.S. as well, either for work you’ve published here, or work you have not been able to publish in the U.S. So here, thanks to Joyce, is a little sampling of her current listing of international literary market opportunities:

Mslexia is a wonderful British magazine for women who write. They welcome submissions for every part of the magazine (apart from the Editor's letter). Explore the website to submit.

The Capilano Review, Canada

A visual and literary arts magazine published three times per year. Strives to publishes only the very best fiction, poetry, or visual art. Has a long history of publishing new and established Canadian writers and artists who are experimenting with or expanding the boundaries of conventional forms and contexts. International writers and artists are also published. Pays $50 per published page to a maximum of $200.

Dandelion, Canada

A semi-annual literary magazine published in journal format. Publishes Canadian and international writers and artists. Pays $30 for submissions, plus a one year subscription. Only submissions responding to specific calls for submissions will be read. See guidelines at site for current calls.

Italy Magazine, Italy

A general-interest magazine covering a wide variety of topics concerning Italian life. Always on the lookout for writing with great images and a strong narrative flow. Regular features include holidays, wine, food, gardens, house interiors, culture, learning Italian, fashion and sport. Seeking well-illustrated articles from freelancers on any aspect of Italy and its lifestyle, culture, food, crafts or lesser-known holiday destinations.

MacLean’s Magazine, Canada

Diverse editorial content from politics and business to sports and the arts. Has a distinctly Canadian perspective.

Asian Geographic Passport, Singapore

Launched in August 2008, a quarterly travel and adventure guide to 'Travel Without Borders' in the Asia Pacific region. Has a simple mission: to bring Asia to you, so that you can experience Asia. Also covers Australia and New Zealand and the tropical atolls of the Pacific. Paying market.

Country Smallholding, UK

A monthly magazine for smallholders, small farmers and anyone interested in self-sufficiency, both rural and urban. Carries practical-based articles on small livestock, organic production, herbs, crafts, cookery, building, energy and any other aspect of small-scale agricultural production. Paying market.

Poem Insight by Charles Simic

A poem is a secret shared by people who have never met each other. - Charles Simic

I loved this little insight into the power of poetry. Don't need to say much more. Let me know what you all think.

Guest Blog By Jessica Handler: Writing Exercise: Venn Diagrams and Finding Yourself in a Character

Welcome to my good friend Jessica Handler, author of the memoir Invisible Sisters, who is my guest blogger today, as part of the Blogathon’s guest blog challenge. Since I tend to present writing exercises on Mondays, I asked her to contribute one of her favorites. This one works for fiction as well as nonfiction; here’s Jessica:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the intersection between self and character on the page. I’m a nonfiction author, but am working on a novel, and I know that in order to imbue my protagonist with real emotions and authentic successes and failures, she’s got to reflect some truths about my own best and worst characteristics. She's nothing like me, on the outside. Her story takes place before I was born. She's a teenager, and I'm a grown woman. And of course, I never, ever, lie. So where do I find the place that the two characters, writer and author, intersect?

In a Venn diagram. These overlapping circles are used to graph all kinds of connecting elements. The Wikipedia definition says, in part, that Venn diagrams show all hypothetically possible logical relations between a finite collection of sets. The textbook I use when I teach media history uses one to illustrate commonalities in communication methods. My niece, a recent graduate in psychology, told me at dinner this week that she “just loves Venn diagrams.”

So what’s to love if you’re using one as writing tool? Try one and find out. Get a pen or pencil and a sheet of paper. Draw a circle on one side of the page that represents your fictional protagonist. Within that circle, make a list of that character’s personality traits, quirks, and challenges – whatever you’re struggling with conveying.  Now, draw a circle closer to the right side of the page, but make sure to overlap a portion of the two circles. On the non-connected part of the top circle, write a list of your own personality traits, quirks, and challenges that are relevant to what you’re struggling with conveying in your protagonist. Here’s a picture of one I’m working on:

You’ll start to notice similarities in the two lists. In the connecting, or overlapping, section of the two circles, write those traits that you share with your character. It’s here, in this list, that you’ll find the resonant moments and actions that you can build upon to help you make your fictional character memorable and, the best way, true.

Helene Hanff on Writing Memoir: You've Left Yourself Out of It!

Since I’m still in the rosy glow of my crush on Helene Hanff’s classic epistolary memoir 84, Charing Cross Road, I will share with you one of her priceless insights on writing memoir that I found as I went in search to learn more about her and her masterpiece. The following is from a 1985 interview Helene Hanff gave to Sybil Steinberg, which appeared in Publisher’s Weekly on the occasion of the publication of her memoir Q’s Legacy:

“She [Helene Hanff] has learned, she says, that she can only write about things that have happened to her. ‘You'd be amazed how many ways you can tell the same autobiography. I've never written anything else, though I never told the whole story in any of them. But each time Gene Young [her editor] read the first draft of my books, she called and said, 'You've left yourself out of it.' It took me just ages to get up the nerve to start with me. So this time, when I first had the horrible suspicion I was about to fall down the same rat hole again, I tacked up a sign over my typewriter: 'You've left yourself out of it!'”

The Literary Life: Amazon Reviews Make a Difference

Now that I'm into writing reviews on amazon as part of my quest for a broader literary life, I was happy to read on the Creative Penn that those ratings and reviews make a difference in where a book shows up in the Recommended Lists on amazon. Lesser known authors can have their books materialize in these recommendations when they have a significant number of reviews, and all of a sudden they are a player. Joanna Penn of the Creative Penn relates her experience with her thriller Pentecost:

"Ratings and Reviews make a difference. Pentecost has 32 reviews as I am writing this with 4.5 star rating on Amazon.com. This is more than a whole lot of big name authors and clearly Amazon pays attention when readers are enthusiastic about a book."

So: Write amazon reviews and rate those books you read!

Reading: In Love with: 84, Charing Cross Road

“i never can get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived.”

Helene Hanff, in her letter of January 9, 1952 in 84, Charing Cross Road

I am tempted to put this quote as the mantra of this blog here. Maybe under the headline? Isn't it perfect for the nonfiction writer? What do you readers think about that? (BTW, the uncapitalized “I” is Helene’s original, not my typo. Amazingly her writing from more than 50 years ago looks a lot like some emails or text messages do today.)

My Advanced Memoir Workshop and I just finished reading 84, Charing Cross Road. Once in a while I make them read a classic (usually the students vote on the books), and while some of them expected to hate the book, by about page 5 everybody was in love, including me. With its bare 97 pages, it’s a quick read; there is no introduction, and no afterword. It contains only the letters, and not even all the letters, exchanged between Helene Hanff, a curmudgeonly freelance writer living in New York City, and a used book store in London from 1949 to 1969. The rather proper Frank Doel is her main correspondent, but others chime in.

I asked everyone to pick a favorite letter to share in class. Many chose Helen’s November 18, 1949 letter that has no greeting and begins with (in capital letters): “WHAT KIND OF A BLACK PROTESTANT BIBLE IS THIS?” My favorite is on page 44 (February 9, 1952) from where I got the above quote. In it she also says: “It’s against my principles to buy a book I haven’t read, it’s like buying a dress you haven’t tried on.” I totally agree with that!

As I was reading I kept asking myself: What is it about this spare book that is so charming, so intriguing, so engaging that it has become a classic and has been made into a stage play and a movie? There’s no romance, no tragic love story, no heroic event, no war or adversity to overcome, no death. Although Frank dies in the end (and that almost made me cry) the book is not about that. One of my students put it best: It’s about the everyday, and thus a most universal theme.

I was amazed how much this book contains: the story of a friendship, a contrast in characters, a glimpse into post-war England, cultural differences (New York Dodgers vs. Tottenham Hotspurs), and of course, discourses on sometimes rather obscure books. But what is most engaging, I believe, are the voices. While I expected the epistolary form to be constraining (no scenes, no action, no description), it proved to be the perfect conveyor of these characters, or at least the sides of them they wanted to portray. And it leaves a lot of white space for the reader to imagine and fill in the story. Therein, I think, lies its ultimate magic: The reader is entirely engaged as he or she is privy to this extraordinary, and at the same time rather ordinary correspondence.

If you haven’t read it yet, read it and be charmed! It takes only one evening or one plane ride. Then go watch Anthony Hopkins as Frank and see how he does. Oh, and let me know about that quote, please!

The Literary Life: Book Readers vs. Book Owners

I loved how the CEO of Penguin, John Makinson, differentiated between book readers and book owners when asked, in Monday's article in the Wall Street Journal, whether there will be a time when physical books are no longer published.

He said that a book reader is someone who "wants the experience of reading the book" and for someone like that a digital reader is perfect. But he also said that physical books won't go away as long as there are people who are book owners, who want "to give, share and shelve books."

Glancing at the wall-to-wall book shelves in our living room, I know what I am. I remember a friend who reads a lot telling me how happy she was about her new Kindle because it was always the same size and fit perfectly into her purse. The idea of being able to download books from anywhere, and having a reading queue right there in my purse sounded definitely practical.

But then I thought to myself that that was exactly what I didn't want. I didn't want every book to be the same size. I want every book to be different because I am the kind of person who remembers the cover, or remembers where on a page I spotted a quote I loved. I am someone who dog ears her books and underlines favorite passages. And, as you can see, I love having my own library.

What kind of book person are you?

My First Haiku

I didn't expect to take up today's Blogathon 2011 theme of haiku because I'm not one to write poetry, let alone haiku, but yesterday I had half an hour to spare waiting to pick up my son in downtown Chicago, so I walked over to Buckingham Fountain, sat on a bench in the mild light of the early spring evening, and took notes on my surroundings. Little did I know that I was preparing to write my first haiku:

The fountain spews.
Its veil of water billows
in the lake breeze.

Writing Exercise: Color List - Shades of Green

One of the challenges in writing evocative descriptions is getting the color just right. Making your reader see what you see will draw him or her into the scene, and will help you create a three-dimensional world out of words. That means having a good color repertoire, and one that lets you pull an adjective or noun out of your tool box that will evoke the color without necessarily mentioning it.

So here's one of my favorite writing exercises: the color list. Since it's May and finally spring in Chicago, green is what I see everywhere, so today's writing challenge is to come up with words that let you see green, and only green. So a word like "leaves" will not work because, come fall, they can be anything but green. You'd have to say "leaves in May" which can be quite evocative. What are words that make you see green? Paint palettes, plants and food are great sources. Here's my list for today, please add yours in comments:

avocado
cactus
celery
clover
cucumber
emerald
eucaplyptus
fern
forest
Granny Smith apple
grass
Kiwi
jade
juniper
leaves in May
lichen
lime
mint
moss
olive green
pea
pistachio
sage
shamrock
verdigris

My "Momoir" in Honor of Mother's Day

My older son & I, Sanibel Island, Oct 1998

Following on Friday's post regarding SMITH Magazine's six-word "momoir" project in honor of Mother's Day, here's my own:

My kids: toughest taskmasters, greatest joy.

Feel free to contribute your own in comments!

And: Happy Mother's Day!

Poem: Window Washer

If this poem isn't a study in strong verbs, I don't know what is. It appeared in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry: Column 318:

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I love poems that take pains to observe people at their tasks, and here’s a fine one by Christopher Todd Matthews, who lives in Virginia.

Window Washer 

One hand slops suds on, one
hustles them down like a blind.
Brusque noon glare, filtered thus,
loosens and glows. For five or
six minutes he owns the place,
dismal coffee bar, and us, its
huddled underemployed. A blade,
black line against the topmost glass,

begins, slices off the outer lather,
flings it away, works inward,
corrals the frothy middle, and carves,
with quick cuts, the stuff down,
not looking for anything, beneath
or inside. Homes to the last,
cleans its edges, grooms it for
the end, then shaves it off
and flings it away. Which is
splendid, and merciless. And all
in the wrist. Then, he looks at us.
We makers of filth, we splashers
and spitters. We sitters and watchers.
Who like to see him work.
Who love it when he leaves
and gives it back: our grim hideout,
half spoiled by clarity.


Can you add your own verbs describing movements of the hand?

In Honor of Mothers Day: "Momoirs"

"Pregnancy is poetry. Parenting is prose."

(As heard on Twitter May 4 via SMITH Magazine)

What a priceless assessment of motherhood! In honor of Mother's Day, check out SMITH Magazine's Six-Word Momoirs Project and contribute your own six-word memoir on motherhood!

Best Literary Magazines for Nonfiction (Updated)

Following up on my list of January, I’ve just updated my personal ranking of literary magazines with the Pushcart Prize 2011 information. I list magazines that publish literary nonfiction, namely essays and/or memoir. My top tier now includes magazines that have won either a 2011 or 2010 Pushcart for Nonfiction, or had an essay included in Best American Essays 2010, or achieved some of the same in either 2009 or 2008, although my review of those years is not as thorough.

As in January, my list does not include icons like The New Yorker or Vanity Fair which hardly ever publish unsolicited work. I also don’t list journals that do not accept simultaneous submissions because I am very reluctant to have a piece tied up for months by one journal. (I have a separate list for those and will share that soon.) This is why stellar journals like the Georgia Review are not listed here.

Please note that journals are listed in alphabetical order:

Agni

Alaska Quarterly Review

Fourth Genre

Gettysburg Review

Granta

Harvard Review

Iowa Review

Missouri Review

New Letters

Ninth Letter

Ploughshares

River Teeth

Shenandoah

Southern Review

The Paris Review

Virginia Quarterly Review

My 3 Favorite Books on Writing Memoir

Taking up today's Blogathon 2011 theme "My five favorite books on...," I am listing my favorite books on writing memoir. However, I am only listing three because in all my years of studying memoir, I have read many how-to books but I only go back to these three. I'm also not a big believer in books on writing - you can get your head scrambled that way and get lost in a lot of theory and terminology. The best way to learn how to write is to read, read and read some more in your genre.

Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington is my favorite how-to memoir book. All my students have to get it because I want them to have something on their shelf they can refer back to when they find themselves struggling with a particular aspect of writing memoir, be it timeline or voice, writing about trauma or using humor. It is a very readable "textbook" that covers all the basics and also analyzes some memoirs and how the writers tackled certain issues. I put "textbook" in quotation marks because this is not a theory-heavy book but one that you will refer to many times. It also offers great writing prompts and exercises, and a reading list to get started with.


In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, memoir writers like Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison or Annie Dillard write about how they wrote their memoirs: what they struggled with, what their goals were for the book, how they finally found their voice, how their families reacted, etc. Their insights are illuminating, and to read some of their memoirs in conjunction with their views here of writing them is particularly insightful. This book is a wonderful second book to read about writing memoir once you've gotten your feet wet.



Abigail Thomas's Thinking About Memoir is really a memoir about writing memoir, presented in little snippets of musing on writing, everyday life, and how she came to write her memoirs Safekeeping and A Three Dog Life. In this tiny book, she offers her priceless insights ("Be honest, dig deep, or don't bother.") as she shares how she got into writing memoir after having considered herself a fiction writer all her life. Along the way she offers many prompts to "write two pages about..." that will have you consider angles on your life you never knew existed. My copy is dog-eared, with many sentences underlined, and I pick it up often for reassurance and inspiration.

I'd be interested to hear your take on these books if you've read them, or your favorite books on writing memoir if you have any to add.