Hi there party people!
The Sequoya Review 2012 edition is out and about! Check us tabling at the UTC University Center Wednesday, or send us an email and we can get in touch! Additionally you’ll be able to read it online soon. More information to come – we should have a release party at some point.
Wouldn’t it be nice every now and then to have something to use as sort of a springboard for creativity? Between school and work and the many other things that clutter our daily lives, sometimes it can be hard to find genuine inspiration, or to even think of ways to do so. That’s what we’re here for. Every week or so we’ll be posting a new writing prompt in case you’re one of the many that frequents that creative rut that so often comes with writing. That said, to start off, today’s prompt is easy.
Take a poem you have already written and are not particularly fond of. Now, rearrange it any way that you want to. You may add or subtract words here or there, but try to do so infrequently. Make it an entirely different poem using the same words, just in a different pattern. See if you can become more satisfied with the poem simply by moving the words around.
This is actually a really great tip on how to improve or add a fresh perspective to your poetry, especially when you feel stuck or are unhappy with a poem you’re working on. In a poetry workshop class I had here at UTC, while workshop-ing one of my poems, my professor (the one and only Earl Braggs, to be exact), asked me to read a specific stanza of my poem backwards, that is, reading the last line first, the second-to-last line second, and so on, from the bottom up. Needless to say, it worked brilliantly, and to this day, that particular poem is saved with that revision.
So go ahead, try it! You never know what new things you might discover in something you’ve already written.
Recently I was defeated. I spent a week and a half writing a story. It turned out to be junk. I spent three days trying to fix it, and ultimately came out defeated in the process.
Harry Crews, author of A Feast of Snakes, in an interview–you can watch the clip here: –stated that he had burned half a novel. “I had taken a wrong turn,” he said. Crews says the amateur, or the coward, takes a wrong turn yet continues, because he or she doesn’t want to do that all over again. The artist, he says, takes the work and throws it into the fire, and does it all over again. I’m paraphrasing, slightly, but yes––how often do we try and take a story or poem we know is sorry and turn it into something, well, less bad? We take our joke amateur piece through about four workshops and by the end we’re left with a turd wrapped in gold aluminum foil.
I have a kind of nine circles of hell on my laptop for my writing. Three circles, really. The semi-occasional polished pieces go into a folder, very lamely titled Stories Turning Out Well. This folder is displayed on my desktop, in the buff before my eyes each day, to give me hope, I assume. Then there is the folder titled, simply, Stories. This is for junk I wrote when I first started, as well as writing exercises I’ve done on my own and in my various workshop classes. The third folder, which lies within the Stories folder, is also called Stories. Yes, it is not a very creative folder name, but consider it a testament to the lack of creativity of the work that gets tossed in there.
My new story is going into that folder. But I guess I’m no Harry Crews. I didn’t hit the delete button; I certainly didn’t burn it in a barrel behind my house like a madman, the way I picture Crews doing it. But as a young writer I like to hang onto my mistakes, so that maybe one day I can look back and read over the bad stuff, perhaps a way of gauging how far I’ve come.
And I guess my point is that young writers, or writers in general, must be willing to accept failure. If we can’t accept failure we’ll destroy our potential as artists.
I spent three days changing every damned sentence of a story that had no potential. After you do that kind of hasty editing, you come out with some creature of a very botched surgery job. Once I had exhausted myself, I couldn’t understand a line of my story. And failure, its liable to make you want to drink yourself to death. I felt the brief gust of melancholy when I realized it was hopeless. But a writing buddy had referred me in the past to the Harry Crews interview. I watched it again, and now the only thing on my mind is the next story.
So when you know its hopeless, just throw it into the fire, and think about the next story or poem. This may seem like a common bit of wisdom, but consider it a reminder. Watch the Crews video. Keep writing, dammit, and don’t be afraid to reject your own work. Because you’re better than that, right?
I have long curly hair that my younger sister inaccurately calls a “Jewfro.” When I walk on the typical street on an even more typical day, I see that most males have straight hair that is quite short. I pointed this out to my roommate, and he who just happens to have short and straight hair explains that the reason for the paucity of long-haired fellows is that “your long, curly, unkempt hair is ugly.” I have not again asked his opinion regarding hair. When I went to the AWP (Associate Writing Program) Conference, I discovered to my complete and utter joy that curly hair was the majority. There were people with curly hair tied with hair ties, curly hair that ran past their shoulders, curly hair that continued to rise above their heads like one of those Arabian hats, curly hair that scissored left then right, curly hair like cotton candy, curly hair like a teddy bear, and curly hair everywhere. While you might not understand the joy I had at seeing such curly haired goodness, you just need to imagine a boy who has been told day after day after day that “you need a haircut. If you had a bigger nose, then-oh nevermind-you are Jewish.” I loved the conference for the proliferation of talented writers, but I also loved it for the curly hair. They made curling irons for a reason, and this conference was a perfect advertisement for that fact.
Howdy friends,
The Sequoya Review is headed to the Associated Writing Programs Conference on Writing and Literature in Chicago tomorrow! If you don’t know what AWP is, it’s kind of like Bonnaroo for writers, with everything that entails. There’s gonna be a book fair, a lot of crazy panels, and even Margaret Atwood!
We’ll be updating from AWP on this blog and Facebook, giving you a (nearly) play-by-play of the whole conference. So stay tuned!
In the great literary tradition set forth in this post, contributor Daniel Myers gives us the first installment of this, the Top ten Hottest Literary Babes. &mdashEditor
10. Marry Poppins
To break this list, being really, really ridiculously good-looking is not enough. Mary Poppins is not just a physically gorgeous specimen (just look at Julie Andrews!), she dances, prances, and sings like a goddess. She is also fun, energetic, and dances with penguins. I’d give her a spoonful of sugar any day to make my medicine go down.
9. Hermione Granger
Through the first tree books, the only subject Hermione never dominated was in the looks department. Right when it seemed as though she would get a mere B on the attractive scale, she drank from the goblet of hotness. Ron is one lucky wizard.
8. Catherine from Wuthering Heights
She had to choose between Heathcliffe and Edgar even though I’m sure tons of guys were vying for her. While she only lives for half the book, her hotness as illustrated by her offspring shapes the second half. Heathcliffe is tormented by her death, and quite frankly, who wouldn’t be?
7. Jane from Pride and Prejudice
If I were a mother and had to pick a favorite, I too would choose the more attractive one. While her only solid characteristic is her good looks, that’s one glorious characteristic. She would be the Kim Kardashian (without the whorish qualities) of our generation, dating someone from the NFL and then the NBA and so on.
6. Ophelia from Hamlet
You know you’re hot when a prince wants you. Even with Hamlet’s realization that his uncle killed his father and married his mother, he still finds the energy to flirt with her during the play. This is not an indicator of Hamlet’s out of whack head frame, but a testament to Ophelia’s hotness. The reason Hamlet tells her to “get thee to a nunnery” is because he wants to visit it.
The top 5 will come out next week!!!
William Gay died on Thursday, February 23rd, at 68 years. In case you didn’t know, William Gay was a massive bad-ass of the Southern literary tradition. Think of a Larry Brown type figure, but with more emphasis on the gothic side of things. Like Brown, Gay was the real deal, a writer who thrived, eventually (he wasn’t published until 1999), completely outside the academy. He spent his life hanging dry wall, carpentering, and worshiping William Faulkner. It paid off.
Gay spent most of his life in Hohenwald, Tennessee. I have no idea what happens in Hohenwald, but I hear it contains an elephant sanctuary. So I’ve ascertained that great Southern writing and elephants might be closely related. (More thought on that idea later – Flannery O’Connor did have her own peacock farm, for example.)
But my point is this: if you live in Tennessee, or fancy yourself literary, you should read William Gay. Now. Not just for the sake of tribute, but because he was a damn good writer. Gay came to the Meacham Writers Workshop in Fall 2010. I had a chance to meet him. He is just as creepy-looking as any character in one of his novels or short stories, but he was a very humble man. When asked in workshop why he didn’t use quotation marks in his stories, he replied: “Well, Cormac McCarthy doesn’t use them, so I figured it’d be okay.”
We value the academy for helping our writing. Gay just happened to be one of the few exceptions. But we can’t all be sixty-year-old hermit-looking hard asses from the boondocks, sitting by a wood stove reading Blood Meridian with scuffed up, calloused hands from a days hard work. The real deal doesn’t come along often, but when they do, we should be grateful.
Truly great Southern writing emerges less often than other great writing, it may seem (I mean, hell, it’s a small part of the world). But when it does emerge, it tends to be exceptionally fearless in its language and storytelling. William Gay was one of the few who got to the soul of his region and put the time in to make it speak. We lost two of the great Southern writers in the past two years (Barry Hannah passed in ’10). So I ask you all, you literary folks, that next time you get together with your reading buddies, your writing buddies, or go out for a few beers — pay tribute to William Gay, a new ghost of the Southern literary tradition.
William Gay, Barry Hannah, and Larry Brown are having beers together right now, fishing perhaps, knowing of the beyond, what all artists want to know.
William Gay wrote three novels and one proper collection of short stories. If you’re into film, watch “That Evening Sun”, a great one based off Gay’s story “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down”. Hal Holbrook, another ever-cool geezer, plays the protagonist.
So pay tribute to a great writer. Read him. Read Southern Lit; celebrate your region.
You know what? I don’t want to be preachy. Just have a damned beer on William Gay. I’ll be having several in his honor.
So I was going to write a blog post about something I heard on NPR today – about the importance of factual vs. emotional truth in writing – but I realized I they already did that, and that I could link to it like this. I was not disheartened for very long, though, because as I was searching for that article (which was on On the Media, on WUTC at 10 weekdays), I found this article, the second installment of All Things Considered‘s “NewsPoet” segment, where a poet hangs out with news people and writes a poem about it (this one’s a villanelle). While thinking, “Oh, that’s cool, but I need to find that first story,” I found <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/02/24/146817285/what-science-fiction-books-does-a-futurist-read">this one about a futurist's (yes, that is his job) favorite science fiction books.
Finally, I did find the first article (it’s about a book, by the way, Lifespan of a Fact). But by that point I realized two things. I didn’t need to rewrite all those articles that I came across, in fact I couldn’t; they’re already great pieces written by good journalists, and besides I’m not a journalist anyway. And I remembered that I don’t listen to NPR (or APM or PRI or whatever else – you know, public media) nearly as much as I should. I mean, it’s free, it’s incredibly informative, funny, and sometimes just weird enough to appeal to everyone, and it goes on all the time. I don’t know how many of you guys read, listen to, or watch public media (let us know in the comments if you do!), but it’s something we all should do, daily. Wouldn’t it be nice to tear away from Facebook, from Twitter, Memebase, and all the other “alternative news” (which really, are by now totally mainstream) and flat-out time-wasters that we usually spend our internet time on, and actually learn something informative and interesting for once? Something that takes more than thirty seconds to read. Something made for the pure joy of learning, not for ad revenue or political pandering. So yeah, NPR rocks. Just in case you didn’t know.
Wouldn't you love this guy to sit in your office and write a poem about you? NPR gets people like him to. Every month.
Hi friends,
It’s been a pretty exciting month for all of us at Sequoya Review. The 2012 issue of Sequoya Review will be released March 2012. We had a record number of submissions – 207 to be exact – to the 2012 issue, and a record readership of our 2011 issue. Thanks for reading us, and submitting! We have just sorted through all of them to let everyone who submitted know where they stand. If you did submit, thanks for playing! If you made it, congratulations; if not, there’s always next year.
Speaking of next year, we’re doing something crazy at the Sequoya Review this time around: submissions are open February 6! Check out the Submit section of the page for details and the link. (Please do read the guidelines though. We can’t accept it if it’s not in keeping with those, especially since we have so many now.
We also have a new thing going on in our ‘offices’ : we need volunteers to help us out! We’ve grown so much we don’t know what to do with ourselves, and you guys can help out! We need people to do the following:
In return, we’re prepared to give you a credit in the Sequoya Review (which you can mention on your resume!), a better position to be an editor in the fall, and more! If you want to apply, please email us at srvolunteers@yahoo.com and tell us! We take all kinds, and can probably find something for you to do, so don’t hesitate! Please include your full name, academic grade year, cell number, email, and what positions interest you most. And be sure to check out our new Volunteer section for more updates!
Well that’s about it for now. Hope your year is getting to as good of a start as ours!
Party people,
If you’ve been around the Sequoya Review as long as I have, you start to notice some things. Like the fact that we have no logo in the sense that means “an instantly recognizable brand image”. This is something everyone else seems to have, and we are jealous.
So, if you think you have what it takes, submit us a logo for the Sequoya Review! It should be timeless, or at least last us a while; look around here and see if you can find a common thread, let us inspire you so you can inspire us. Let’s get symbiotic up in here!
So here are the boring rule parts:
That’s about it! Submissions are due October 31 to webeditor@sequoyareview.com. Good luck, and happy camping!
