Crazy Semester So Far
This semester has been pretty hectic, certainly busier for me than previous ones.
This means I won’t be updating as often. My posts will be sporadic, but I will do what I can. One prompt a week, on Sundays, instead of Sunday and Thursday.
Some recent posts are Tumblr because I’ve been having issues with wordpress operating at school. Here’s the link: http://www.tumblr.com/tumblelog/slawriter89
The Letter Project–Recent Letters
Check out my recent letter to Theresa at The Letter Project. It is decorated from quotes of Salinger’s short stories.
*Originally appeared on Tumblr
Prompt–Tuesday, September 13
Choose a recent sensory experience that was new for you, or think of one that really grabbed your attention. I gutted a pumpkin last night for its seeds and puree. Here is a poem for you.
Not what I expected. Pies are smooth and spicy in a way that brings falling leaves inside. Your insides are stringy. On the autopsy counter your pulp, seeds and flesh are guarded by skin’s armor, defeated by the knife. Laid open for all to see, you still give generously of your heart’s treasures.
*Originally appeared on Tumblr
Short Story Contest
One of my fellow writers and myself will have a competition. Who can write the most short stories by the end of September?
She is already ahead of me with one completed.
Hopefully I can catch up! At the very least I will have written more short stories in one month than I have previously, and I will be able explore the short stories that have flown around in my head for the last three weeks.
Here’s to friendly competition!
*Originally appeared on Tumblr
Flannery O’Connor Essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”
I wanted to share part of this essay with you. She wrote:
“The great novels we get in the future are not going to be those that the public thinks it wants, or those that critics demand. They are going to be the kind of novels that interest the novelist. And the novels that interest the novelist are those that have not already been written. They are those that put the greatest demands on him, that require him to operate at the maximum of his intelligence and his talents and to be true to the particularities of his own vocation. The direction of many of us will be more toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.
“The problem for such a novelist will be to know how far he can distort without destroying, and in order not to destroy, he will have to descend far enough into himself to reach those underground springs that give life to big work. This descent into himself will, at the same time, be a descent into his region. It will be a descent through the darkness of the familiar into a world where, like the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men [as] if they were trees, but walking. THis is the beginning of vision…”
I’m glad I read the essay because of the novel I’ve been working on since April. It’s one of the first things that I’ve felt I truly need to write. Hopefully I can live up to the story’s challenge.
What do you think?
http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/grotesque.html
*Editor’s note: originally appeared on Tumblr
Prompt–Friday, September 9
Pick up a newspaper and choose a headline that catches your eye. My choice is “Strut a spirited style at games” in The BG News for today and this weekend.
Strut the falcon walk
to the stadium
on the other side.
Let those feathers
flutter in the wind
every single day.
*Editor’s note: originally appeared on Tumblr
Prompt–Monday, September 5
Grab a literary magazine, poetry collection or short story collection for this one.
Randomly pick two consecutive lines (or sentences) of two pieces.
I grabbed Mid-American Review, Volume 31, number 1.
from “Poem for My Father, Who Has Less to Say Now” by Chris Tanseer: “And since it’s winter, the two oaks, still bare of leaves, still standing, / try to tell another story about what happens to the body after we disappear into story.”
from “Winter lays seige to the maiden Hesiod” by Olvido Garcia Valdes: “They are sandals happy as a bath, / as summer, as happiness”
Sandals in autumn. How odd with winter
around the corner, waiting for leaves to fall
into open graves. At least the tree-children
will decompose with the rest of us.
Prompt–Thursday, September 1
I recently acquired my own copy of “Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954” by Jack Kerouac, edited by Douglas Brinkley. The prompt is based on the following sentence: “But a farm is my idea of working for a living, above all things” (62).
Go.
Above All Things
Life is work. So is farming. Each person needs to eat, and what better way to ensure I have enough but to grow it myself? It requires sweat, muscles, and early hours. In the end, though, my stomach is full.
Oops!
Oops is all I can say about the prompt for Sunday. I was in Columbus, Ohio, for the weekend for my mom’s graduation from OSU with a master’s degree.
And I went to Volunteers of America and got new clothes.
There will be a prompt Thursday.
Prompt–Thursday, August 25
I’m taking a media publication and design course this semester. The text is “The Non-Designers Design Book” by Robin Williams and one of the examples had a list of several items. It was called “The Rules of Life” and the one that stood out to me was “Don’t let the seeds stop you from enjoyin’ the watermelon.”
So use the watermelon or make your own list. Mine is below.
Grandpa always sat on the porch
with his hands dripping with juice
from the watermelon on his lap.
“Son,” he would say in his accent
of generations past, “Don’t let
the seeds stop you from enjoyin’
the watermelon. They make sure
there’s watermelon for the future.”
I collected the seeds from the grass
and learned to grow Grandpa’s
favorite summer treat.
Suzanna and Writing 