Teaching Revision: Even More Revision Prompts

October 28, 2019

More revision prompts to add to https://pleiadesmag.com/teaching-revision-all-of-the-revision-prompts-so-far/ - I'm teaching revision again, this time for a senior thesis workshop, in which students are workshopping novels, plays, TV and webisode scripts, whatever they are working on for their final creative writing thesis. Each week, one student workshops their entire manuscript and a revision of part of it. In their ...

3-Minute Book Review: Jennifer Schomburg Kanke on Karen Craigo

October 18, 2019

Three-Minute Book Review: Jennifer Schomburg Kanke on Passing through Humansville, by Karen Craigo (Sundress Publications, 2018). -   1)  If you planted this book in the ground, what would grow? Every plant that grows from this book would turn into something else when you pull back from it a bit. When “two sunflowers wind/ toward their orbs” they’re also ovaries and fallopian tubes. “When she startles/she ...

Experimental Fiction Prompt 2

October 07, 2019

Below is another exercise I gave my students in Experimental Fiction. -- Paired with reading "Pee on Water," by Rachel Glaser A story that takes as its subject the history of the universe leading up to humankind’s “pee on water” might evoke Genesis for some people. “Pee on Water” is, in some sense, in the tradition of creation stories, though the emphasis on peeing on water, coolness, and contraception, ...

10 Craft Book Recommendations

September 18, 2019

From time to time, I have been asked to give craft book recommendations, especially by and/or for writers of color. Having read ~50 craft books in researching my own book, here are ten volumes that I have found useful in thinking about craft, all written by non-white and/or non-Western authors.   Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa. Araki, Hirohiko. Manga in Theory and Practice. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and ...