Hiya folks,
Are you ready to start fresh? Try out some new prompts and produce some new work? Then come to the Word Pirates meeting this Thursday at my house, 7 p.m.
Also: Marcia is bringing a tasty snack treat. Yay!
As usual, please let me know if you can’t make it.
~ Joy
If so, maybe you should enter this:
WIN $3,000 AND PUBLICATION
Prairie Schooner Book Prize SeriesThe 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize competition will award $3,000 and publication through the University of Nebraska Press to one book of poetry and one book of short fiction. A $1,000 prize will be awarded to a runner-up in each category.
Postmark deadline is March 15th, 2007.Manuscripts and $25 entry fee should be mailed to:
Prairie Schooner Book Prize Competition
201 Andrews Hall
PO Box 880334
Univ. of Nebraska
Lincoln NE 68588-0334.For more information visit here.
According to the search results for this page, many people are throwing pirate-themed bashes. So I will help out those who are looking for ideas by telling you the recipe to the Pirate Cupcakes I made for our reading.
Pirate Cupcakes are rum cakes, of course. Originally I was going to make cupcakes from scratch, but I ended up going with this easy recipe:
1 package yellow cake mix
1 package instant vanilla pudding
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1.25 cup rum (or 1 tbs. rum flavoring)
4 eggs1/2 bag dark chocolate chips (1 cup?)
Mix together, putting the chips in last. Bake at 325 degrees for approximately 35 minutes.
It may seem like a lot of rum, but really you can barely taste it once the cupcakes are cooked.
For frosting, I mixed together 1 tsp. vanilla, 1 package cream cheese, and 1 cup whipping cream. It was okay. It tasted good, but was a little on the runny/rich side. I cooked the cupcakes in gold foil and topped them with a gold plastic coin.
Other pirate-themed things that made it to the table included foil-wrapped chocolate gold coins and of course, Pirate’s Booty:
We also had pirate napkins, a coconut pirate head, pirate flags, and normal food including a platter of Mediterranean food, coffee, cheese, spiced nuts, and pastries. Food!
I just happened upon this. I don’t think many Word Pirates write poetry, but hey, if you do, here’s a somewhat unpublicized contest:
The annual Tor House Prize for Poetry is a living memorial to American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962).
The winner will receive $1,000 for an original, unpublished poem not to exceed three pages in length. $200 will be awarded for Honorable Mention.
Final Judge: Al Young
Open to well-crafted poetry in all styles, ranging from experimental work to traditional forms, including short narrative poems. Each poem should be typed on 8 1/2″ by 11″ paper and be no longer than three pages. On a cover sheet only, include: name, mailing address, telephone number and email; titles of poems; bio optional. Multiple and simultaneous submissions welcome.
Reading fee: $10 for the first three poems, $15 for up to six poems and $2.50 for each additional poem.
Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2007
For more information, look at their website.
I think they are looking for narrative poems. You can read last year’s winner, Last of the Midnight Lullabies by Eric Leigh, here. An excerpt:
Last of the Midnight Lullabies
Eric LeighMiddle of the night, my grandfather calls
stuck again in that foxhole,
his buddy’s head shot straight off.
Or he thinks he’s still in the asylum
where the only sounds he heard were those
from the past—stray bullets, his own sobs.
“Machine of Death,” an upcoming anthology of short stories, is looking for submissions. The book will feature stories that, well, sound very fun to write.
“The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words “DROWNED” or “CANCER” or “OLD AGE” or “CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN”. It let people know how they were going to die.“
In the world described, how would you live your life and what would the implications of such a machine be? The editors say they aren’t looking for gimmicky, ironic-twist kind of stories. So don’t throw all the elements of good story-writing out the window for the sake of a cheap gag (Oh, the machine said I would die by a malfunction of a Machine of Death. Aaaaaarg! Now I am dead, etc.).
The deadline is March 31.
-Marcia
Hello Word Pirates,
Thanks for helping to make last night a smashing success. The positive feedback has been phenomenal. People are asking when the next one is!
There will be no meeting next week 2/15. (Let’s enjoy some well-deserved rest) The next meeting will be 3/1. Then we’ll hit the ground running with prompts again.
Until we meet again, matey.
-marcia
The Australian printed an article by Jenny Sinclair, who dislikes writing classes despite being currently enrolled in one right now:
EVERYWHERE I turn, it seems, I see advertisements for writing courses, writing workshops, writing weekends, writing holidays. All of them promise to help participants polish their prose and carve out their characters.
It should be stopped. The only people writing should be those who must write, I scrawl in a notebook as I sit on the side of the running bath while my young son makes duck noises at me.
There is no shortage of people who can, with a little encouragement, write. There are lots of skilled craftspeople. Even more say they want to write, and many of those find their way into university courses, adult education or privately run seminars on the novel, genre, short story and importance of plot. . . . [The programs] provide toolboxes, and with those toolboxes the vaguely talented often turn out the equivalent of high school carpentry projects: a procession of by-the-numbers breakfast trays and carved wooden animals.
For Jenny, a Writer-with-a-capital-W are those who “must” write. It is a lesson she learned when she had cancer. Suddenly, she let her dishes pile up, ignored her son and husband, and became a write-a-holic:
I completed scenes as I waited for chemotherapy, scribbled plot outlines in the radiotherapist’s waiting room, wrote dialogue on the tram, jotted down two-word ideas in a notebook while my car idled at the traffic lights.
All that work paid off! She had an “epiphany”:
It didn’t matter to me if I was any good as long as I wrote. The realisation was like a starburst in the dark of a hot, sleepless night in Thailand, and it hasn’t left me since.
This isn’t writing. This is hypergraphia. And it’s a disease. A serious, serious disease from which one may never return. “Hypergraphia is understood to be triggered by changes in brainwave activity in the temporal lobe.” Hmmm…
It’s true, a writer writes, but that’s not nearly as interesting a question as what would make someone publish a self-righteous rant implying that writing classes are filled with hacks who are not “real” writers?
I have a feeling that most of the mumble-jumble about the value of writing programs has to do with the fact that they boost competition among writers. Writing programs increase the number of people who think they are writers, who in turn flood literary journals and publishers with submissions, making your individual chance of being noticed much slimmer. But, if there were more financial support for journals and independent publishers, there would be more writing opportunities, more writers would get paid, and I think most of the complaint about writing programs would fade away.
So, maybe the solution here is to write rants about how people should buy literary journals, or rants about how programs should encourage writers to support the literary scene, not question what makes someone a “real” writer. Because in the end, that question is kind of useless. Cream rises to the surface in any industry. While it’s true that writers write–they also publish.
Link via Bookninja.
~ Joy
