Writing Advice From Robert McCrum at The Guardian

D. H. Lawrence

In a recent article in The Guardian, "A Lesson In Teaching Writing," Robert McCrumb provides some terrifically austere, old-school models for beginning writers:  "I'm agnostic about the benefits of creative-writing classes, but would-be fictioneers could do worse than emulate the greats."


McCrumb goes on to lay out the below -- "some passages I'd refer to by way of illustrating some technical lessons":

1. The introduction of a fictional landscape

How to bring up the curtain on a narrative setting. Two classic passages:

- The first chapter of Hardy's The Return of the Native
- The opening of EM Forster's A Passage To India

2. Narrative economy

How to get a story going and introduce your protagonists with maximum speed and efficiency, while developing the plot and establishing character and motivation:

- The opening chapter of Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon
- The opening pages of DH Lawrence's Women in Love
- The first two pages of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

3. The joy of dialogue

How to convey character and situation in fictional speech:

- Almost any passage from Beckett's Waiting for Godot
- Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

4. The magic of tone

How to make your voice heard on the page, to mesmerise the reader:

- Lorrie Moore's story "Vissi D'arte" (actually, almost anything by Lorrie Moore illustrates this)
- JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
- Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

5. Pace

How to get started, at top speed:

- Act I of Macbeth
- Virginia Woolf's Orlando
- Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island

6. Impact

How to grab the reader's attention and hold it by the scruff of the neck:

- Graham Greene's "The Destructors"
- Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song
- Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

7. The only rule is that there are no rules

How to defy gravity in prose and still come out a winner:

- Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy
- Melville's Moby Dick
- Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

Geof Hewitt Brings His Slam Poetry to JSC

On February 15, Vermont's own slam poet extraordinaire, Geof Hewitt, stopped by JSC to provide a "reading" of his poetry -- but of course it wasn't just a "reading":  Geof emphasizes a dramatic recitation style that engages and excites his audience, making for a much more intimate experience.  After his reading, Geof provided an extensive slam poetry workshop for JSC students aimed at helping them write and present their work in ways that had powerful effect on the audience.


Geof Hewitt is the author of The Perfect Heart:  Selected and New Poems, Just Words, Only What's Imagined, Hewitt's Guide to Slam Poetry and Poetry Slam, and other books.


Big thanks to JSC Creative Writing student Nichole Dumaine for the photos below . . .



Submit to The Gihon River Review!

Gihon River Review Has a Brand New Soul

-dig it-

The Gihon River Review is a literary magazine produced by the BFA Creative Writing program at Johnson State College.  The magazine is currently seeking poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction pieces.  They continually accept and read manuscripts from September to May.  Poetry submissions may only contain five poems, and Fiction/Nonfiction submissions have a limit of twenty five pages.  If interested, please send your work along with a cover letter and SASE to:

The Gihon River Review

Johnson State College

337 College Hill Road

Johnson, Vermont 05656

or

grr@jsc.edu

Please also mention directly in your cover letter if you would like for your manuscripts to be returned to you.  If published, contributors receive a complimentary copy of the magazine.  Otherwise, you may become a member of the journal's mailing list for an easy payment of $5 per magazine.

The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest!

Submissions Accepted Through February 28th!

The Kenyon Review is currently accepting submissions for its 2011 Short Fiction Contest.  KR is grateful to Amazon.com for their generous support of this contest.  KR will accept electronic submissions February 1st through February 28th, 2011, through the Short Fiction Contest page of the KR website. Ron Carlson will be the final judge. The winning story will be published in The Kenyon Review, and the author will receive a scholarship to the 2011 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, June 18-25th, in Gambier, Ohio. (Scholarship covers tuition, room and board expenses.) There is no entry fee for submission. Please direct questions to kenyonreview@kenyon.edu.

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Full contest details:

Submission Guidelines

• Writers must 30 years of age or younger at the time of submission.
• Stories must be no more than 1200 words in length.
• One submission per entrant.
• Please do not simultaneously submit your contest entry to another magazine or contest.
• The submissions link will be active February 1st to February 28th. All work must be submitted through our electronic system. We cannot accept paper submissions.
• Winners will be announced in the late spring. You will receive an e-mail notifying you of any decisions regarding your work.
• For submissions, we accept the following file formats only:
  • .PDF (Adobe Acrobat)
  • .DOC (Microsoft Word)
  • .RTF (Rich Text Format)
  • .TXT (Microsoft Wordpad and Notepad, Apple TextEdit

As a special gift, all entrants will be mailed a free chapbook that collects the winning stories from the first three years of the contest.

Click here to enter the submissions site

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The final judge will be Ron Carlson, celebrated author of four novels and five short story collections, including most recently The Signal (Viking, 2009), Five Skies (Viking, 2007), and A Kind of Flying (W.W. Norton 2003). His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and dozens of other anthologies. Among his awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award.

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JSC Reading Series Continues! . . .

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9: 

                   MAJOR JACKSON

                                           (5:30pm, Stearns Space)

Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton, 2006), finalist for an NAACP Image Award; Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and Holding Company (W.W. Norton, 2010).  He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Major Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

Below are the remaining events scheduled for the 2011 Spring Reading Series.  All events will take place in the Stearns Student Center Performance Space and are FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC:

2/9/11 (Wednesday):   Major Jackson, poet (5:30pm)

2/16/11 (Wednesday): Geoff Hewitt, slam poet (5:30pm);

                                         Slam Workshop to follow.

3/9/11 (Wednesday):   JSC Student Poetry Slam (8:30pm)

3/14/11 (Monday):       Chris Bachelder, fiction writer (5:30pm)

3/21/11 (Monday):       Kaitlyn Greenidge w/ JSC Students

                                        (fiction) (5:30pm)

4/21/11 (Thursday):     Natasha Trethewey, poet (5:30pm)

Contacts:  Jacob White Jacob.White@jsc.edu
               Elizabeth Powell Elizabeth.Powell@jsc.edu

Glimmer Train Short Story Contest for New Writers

Glimmer Train Stories awards thousands of dollars in prizes throughout the year in its long-running series of writing contests.  Many writers have begun successful careers as winners or finalists in these contests, and at the very least these contests provide an opportunity to publish your work in a highly visible, widely read magazine.

The current contest is The Short Story Award for New Writers, the guidelines of which are below:

We are interested in reading your original, unpublished stories!

• We don't publish stories for children, I'm sorry.
• Multiple submissions are fine. You can send more than one submission per competition, if you like, or submit the same story for different categories, if it qualifies.
• When we accept a story for publication, we are purchasing first-publication rights. (Once we've published your story, you are free to, for instance, include it in your own collection.)

To make a submission: Please send your work via our new online submission procedure.
It's easy, will save you postage and paper, and is much easier on the environment.
Just click here to go to the Online Submissions page to get started.



Dates: The category will be open to submissions for one full month, from the first day through 
midnight (Pacific time) of the last day of the month. Results will be posted at www.glimmertrain.org.

• February. Results will be posted on April 30.
• May. Results will be posted on July 31.
• August. Results will be posted on October 30.
• November. Results will be posted on January 31.

Reading fee:

• $15 per story.

Prizes:

• 1st place wins $1,200, publication in Glimmer Train Stories, and 20 copies of that issue.
• 2nd-place: $500
• 3rd-place:$300

Other considerations: 

• Open only to writers whose fiction has not been presented in a print publication with a circulation over 5,000. (Entries, of course, must be unpublished.)
• Most submissions to this category run 3,000 to 6,000 words, but can go up to 12,000 words.

I suspect that more than a few editors fail to read beyond the first paragraph of stories sent them by unknown writers. Not so with the editors of Glimmer Train--they seek out new voices in fiction and provide them with valuable exposure. Shortly after my work appeared in Glimmer Train, a collection of my short stories was accepted for publication.  --George Makana Clark