Author: Brad Johnson

Poetic Form Fridays are made to share various poetic forms. This week, we look at the espinela, a Spanish poetic form.

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Espinela Poems

The espinela is a Spanish poetic form with two stanzas and four end rhymes across 10 lines. It’s named after poet Vincente Espinel, who is credited with inventing it. Here are the guidelines:

• First stanza has four lines.
• Second stanza has six lines.
• Eight syllables per line.
• Rhyme scheme is abba/accddc.

If it feels like you’ve heard these rules and tried an espinela before, it’s likely that you have (on this very blog even). That’s because this form is also known as a decima! The only difference I’ve noticed between the rules on that post and this one is that we break up the 10 lines into two stanzas instead of one.

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Here’s my attempt at an espinela:

sweet sorrow, by Robert Lee Brewer

i want to let her remember
but i can’t make anyone care
about an old picture or chair
that represent past decembers

our shared lives are now just embers
glowing hot but not much longer
for she thinks i’ve somehow wronged her
or maybe it is just the world
and our shared past has just unfurled
in a way that just grows stronger

The post Espinela: Poetic Forms by Robert Lee Brewer appeared first on Writer's Digest.

We know what you’re thinking: “Is there a way to make Dungeons and Dragons even nerdier?” It’s your lucky day, dear reader, because the answer is yes! We’ve assembled the D&D characters we imagine some of our favorite authors playing as, complete with backstory and stats. You can also use this as a guide to play as your favorite author, which will probably be a lot of fun for both you and your DM who wanted this to be a serious fantasy campaign. Get your dice ready, because it’s time to roll for authorship. 

Edgar Allan Poe

Race: Gnome
Class: Warlock
Alignment: Chaotic neutral
Highest stat: Intelligence
Abilities: Arcana, Medicine
Special equipment: Mysterious bag of bricks and brick-laying tools

A small goth who mistakenly became a warlock when he pledged his allegiance to the god of Getting Murdered. He was forced out of his village over allegations that he was a drunk, but really he was just trying to rid himself of the dark god hiding in his floorboards.

Haruki Murakami

Race: Half-Elf
Class: Paladin
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Highest stat: Intelligence
Abilities: Investigation, Persuasion
Special equipment: A hot younger woman with whom he has a non-sexual relationship

A paladin professor who seeks to educate young paladins in the ways of celibacy and morality. He travels around the coast, respecting women and spreading his surrealist philosophies.  

Stephen King

Race: Dragonborn
Class: Sorcerer
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Highest stat: Charisma
Abilities: Survival, Stealth
Special equipment: A new idea for a novel that he’ll have finished in two weeks

A dragonborn who became a sorcerer after a childhood brush with a demonic clown. He spends his time wandering around semataries, casting frightening spells and illusions that leave passersby chilled to the bone. 

Margaret Atwood

Race: Gnome
Class: Wizard
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Highest stat: Constitution
Abilities: Survival, Insight
Special equipment: A great theme for one of Kylie Jenner’s parties

She was raised in a noble house but kicked out for prophesying that her wealthy, patriarchal family would bring about a dystopian turn in society. Now she’s trying to convince others that her visions are true so she can stop her family.

Oscar Wilde

Race: Elf
Class: Bard
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Highest stat: Charisma
Abilities: Performance, Perception, Persuasion
Special equipment: Painting of himself but older

His wealthy parents planned to disown him for his lack of direction in life, but they died under mysterious circumstances before anything could be made official and he inherited a fortune. He enjoys throwing elaborate parties where he convinces his most important guests to divulge their secrets to him.

Carmen Maria Machado

Race: Tiefling
Class: Warlock
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Highest stat: Dexterity
Abilities: Sleight of Hand, Insight, Arcana
Special equipment: Green velvet ribbon (do not touch!)

She grew up alone in a haunted mansion, with only spirits for company. Eventually these ghosts became her closest confidants, and they introduced her to a god of Dark Magic who granted her spellcasting abilities. Spirits still tend to follow her around, asking for favors and demanding their deaths be avenged. 

Alison Bechdel

Race: Human
Class: Sorcerer
Alignment: Neutral Good
Highest stat: Wisdom
Abilities: History, Insight
Special equipment: Raincoat of love

In every mirror, she sees herself as she was in the past. She can even visit certain memories by enchanting large mirrors. An encounter with Death gave her these abilities and more, and she must fight to stay present when the past is so accessible.

Yoko Ogawa

Race: Half-Orc
Class: Wizard
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Highest stat: Intelligence
Abilities: Investigation, Arcana, Perception
Special equipment: Hand-shaped carrots

She looks like a sweet young woman carrying a strawberry shortcake, but in reality she’s a devourer of bodies and souls. All the creatures she consumes leave their stories inside of her, and she enjoys sitting in her garden, running through films of their lives in her mind.

Walt Whitman

Race: Half-Elf
Class: Druid
Alignment: Neutral Good
Highest stat: Wisdom
Abilities: Animal Handling, Nature, Insight
Special equipment: Barbaric yawp

Never fully accepted in either human or elf society, he made his way into the woods and never left. He’s become more tree than creature, with a beard of lichen and mushrooms growing from all his knuckles. His gray beard points in the direction of oncoming threats, so he can defend his forest home from danger.  

Marlon James

Race: Halfling
Class: Fighter
Alignment: Lawful Good
Highest stat: Wisdom
Abilities: Insight, History
Special equipment: National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for The Book of Night Women
Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Fiction) for The Book of Night Women
Minnesota Book Award (Novel & Short Story) for The Book of Night Women
Silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for A Brief History of Seven Killings
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction for A Brief History of Seven Killings
OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Fiction category winner), for A Brief History of Seven Killings
Man Booker Prize for Fiction for A Brief History of Seven Killings
Green Carnation Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings
National Book Award for Fiction finalist for Black Leopard, Red Wolf

A prize-winning halfling fighter who’s become famous in throughout the world. Unfortunately, his dream isn’t to fight, but to learn to shapeshift. He’s now partially retired and spending his fortune searching for someone who will grant him the magic he needs to become a shapeshifter. 

Shirley Jackson

Race: Gnome
Class: Rogue
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Highest stat: Intelligence
Abilities: Arcana, Stealth, Intimidation
Special equipment: The death-cup mushroom

Her parents died when she was young, and she was raised by her older sister in half-destroyed mansion. As an adult, she left home to track down any men who hurt women and enact justice on them. Often referred to as The Ghost because of her haunting looks and her ability to remain unseen by those she wishes to harm—although she wishes people would call her The Werewolf.

Ernest Hemingway

Race: Human
Class: Ranger
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Highest stat: Constitution
Abilities: Animal Handling, Intimidation, Performance
Special equipment: Fishing rod that he claims he used to catch an enormous fish (no evidence of said fish)

After the war, he began tracking down the rarest animals in the world in order to capture them or their magic. He runs a black-market animal trade and has become successful from that venture, but secretly he hopes to leave the business and search for his true love. 

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The post What Famous Authors Would Look Like as D&D Characters appeared first on Electric Literature.

‘Many people – many nations – can find themselves believing, more or less consciously, that “every stranger is an enemy”. For the most part, this conviction lies buried in the mind like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and is not the basis of a system of thought. But when this happens, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, stands the Lager [camp]. It is the product of a conception of the world carried to its logical consequences with rigorous consistency; as long as the conception exists, the consequences remain to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister signal of danger.’

—Primo Levi, preface to If This Is a Man, translated from the Italian by Stuart Woolf

 

 

Six years and six days ago, it was 3 October 2013.

Just before dawn, an immigrant boat capsized some 500 yards off the shores of Lampedusa, the Italian island that marks Europe’s southernmost point. Three hundred sixty-eight people died in that shipwreck. The sea continued to disgorge dead bodies for days and days afterwards. The smallest of those bodies was a new-born baby. The tiny body was still attached to the mother’s corpse by its umbilical cord.

In the days immediately following the shipwreck, the island is besieged by hordes of news reporters and politicians. Powerful figures from Italian and European institutions parade before the television cameras. ‘Never again,’ they swear. They make solemn vows, they shake hands with fierce intent, they pose for the customary photos, they send out tweets to their followers, then they leave the island.

Three days ago, it was 7 October 2019.

There’s been another shipwreck, the latest in an endless succession.

Thirteen corpses are recovered.

All of them women.

There are twenty or so immigrants still lost at sea, eight of them children.

The search continues, but those bodies remain missing.

Sometimes the sea gives back, sometimes it keeps.

Yesterday it was 10 October 2019.

A funeral mass is held in church for the thirteen women.

Not a single prominent Italian official attends, not a single European official. Not the mayor of Lampedusa, not a single representative of the Sicilian region, not a single member of Italy’s national government, not a single representative of the European Union. No international TV news crews, no foreign correspondents.

It’s been six years, and death has become an annoyance.

 

It’s a sign of the times: children separated from their mothers and fathers, brothers separated from sisters, individuals separated from their homes. By now, they’re reduced to numbers, statistics, ciphers. They try to make it across borders, for any of a number of reasons: war, famine, religious creed, simple yearning. There are countless obstacles: deserts, walls, barbed wire, the sea and the sheer cruelty of their fellow man. Their bodies bear detailed accounts of the journey: wounds, mutilations and fractures tell the tale of the harrowing violence they’ve suffered. Examinations performed on women who arrive in Europe by sea at the Lampedusa medical clinic confirm that nearly all of them have been raped.

Things we still don’t know, and that those bodies can’t tell us: how many times a day is a given woman raped, for how many days running, during her exodus across the desert, and during her confinement in a Libyan refugee camp?

 

In this diseased Europe of ours, people increasingly give in to fear, delivering themselves into the trammels of terror, allowing themselves to be devoured by hatred. They sense danger everywhere, they live with jangled nerves. They’re so overwhelmed by anxiety that having an enemy to fear has become a physical need. On the other side of the border, just over the sea, there are fathers, mothers, and children who have just been separated. These are men and women, girls and boys, toddlers and infants who carry traumas within them – traumas as vast and gigantic as the briny deep. And yet they continue their journey. After all, where else can they go, if not straight ahead? They take on the desert. They defy the prison camps in Libya. They venture across the sea. They display a fierce attachment to life that this aging, cowardly Europe has long since forgotten.

To them, life is still something sacred.

In Lampedusa, the mothers’ bodies arrived three days ago, ready to be laid in their coffins.

It was October 7, 2019.

Their children are still missing, lost among the swells of the sea.
The separation of loved ones is one of the statistics that allow us to understand the contemporary world.

 

Separation, flight, a sea to cross.

The same old story, told again and again.

A young Phoenician woman escapes from the city of Tyre, crossing the desert until she reaches its end. Now she looks out on the facing sea. A white bull appears, kneels down, and offers her his back, turning himself into a boat. The young woman crosses the Mediterranean Sea and lands on Crete.

The young woman’s name is Europa.

This is our origin.

We are the children of a sea-crossing by boat.

 

Image © European Space Agency

The post Eleventh of October appeared first on Granta Magazine.

A typical child feels dangerously. Ideally the typical carer of this typical child creates a space where such dangerous feelings are not unacceptable: they can be expressed without too much humiliation or bodily harm. Such a caring carer sets meaningful and predictable boundaries. They absorb the most difficult of the child’s difficult feelings without the child becoming shadowed with guilt for requiring such care. Ideally the carer and the child, or carers and children, who share a loving, difficult, typical household contain one another, psychologists say, like some kind of garment that is also a wardrobe.

 

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(All C needs to do is make it out of his bedroom and along the landing to his father’s bedroom. C’s father lies inside a colossal black tulip that is carnivorous. C must free his father from the tulip’s mouth before his father is digested. The great disaster is that C’s bed is soaked with piss and his father does not enjoy changing the sheets. Another great disaster is that between C and his father are his assailants and yet C’s fellow knights are at their leisure, as though the battle is won. It is possible that the knights do not see C’s assailants because his assailants are precisely the same size and shape as the bedroom. He attempts to explain this to the knights but what comes out of his mouth is C’s own language, which they do not understand. Lancelot is virtuous and pure but useless as chewed paper. Galahad is what he imagines meat tastes like. C imagines dancing with Galahad at the feast where Galahad eats all of the meat. The dance is geometric and intimate while nobody touches and he feels hard and yielding at the same time, the way that the grey trunk of Galahad’s horse is composed of clouds. C has spiky flowers in his hair, which is the way Galahad likes it. Galahad is a dark machine that dances like a father who is happy. The whole scene has the texture of a rug made from a furry animal, luxurious and sinister and C feels suddenly responsible for a death. C retreats from the awfulness of this feeling then slaps himself furiously on his stinging thighs in an attempt to bring himself back to the surface. He waits beside a mirror until the knight is tired from all of his eating and the long joust and the weight of his excellence and eventually falls asleep beside his blue plumes. C looks at the sleeping knight’s armour. He trembles at what he is compelled to do. He draws courage from his extraordinary results in his recent exam on plant biology. There are twenty-five layers of armour and when C is dressed finally he falls over with the weight into the mud on the bedroom floor. To his great relief Louise Nurding is too busy learning her lyrics to notice. How on earth does she remember the words while moving her legs and her arms in the ways that are correct? C cannot even coordinate himself to explain plant biology to his father while eating vegetable stew and making sure that his father does not cry out of his eyes. Louise mistakes the shadowy movements of his assailants for the beat. It is possible, it occurs to him, that an assailant is hiding inside Louise Nurding. He begins to cry. But it is as though everyone is looking over his shoulder at someone else who is the one who is actually crying. He is glad to feel his soft carrot-like ribs heave inside his armour. He thinks of the beached whales that he knows are blown up by explosives. He would rather they replanted the whales in the part of the rainforest that his father purchased on his behalf, the only part that will remain intact by the time C becomes a man. He thinks of all the specks of himself and of his father that have brushed off his skin and off his father’s skin and scattered around the house. He imagines that the furniture is saddened by the specks when they land. The bookshelves, with their thunderous clouds of dust, are saddest of all. They are so sad that they spend all day laughing. It is only at night that the sadness of the furniture, a hilarious daytime sadness, becomes a nocturnal rage. Like a bowling ball C’s own rage is returned to him from an obscure hole in the ground, jumpy and ready to knock down all in its way. He remembers his mission. The door of his bedroom is a horizon dot. It is indistinguishable from the column of enemy infantry cresting the black hill. He will need to be armed. He crawls to the corner where he stores his sword. For his thirteenth birthday he asked his father for a sword. This was on account of his terrible disappointment with his judo apprenticeship. It was becoming apparent that Big Mark with the handlebar moustache and the glossy shins was never going to reveal what a man truly was capable of. Manhood, C knows, is an invitation to the enemies. If he is going to be a man and defend himself from the assailants of all men, he concluded, either they would all have to wear judogi and be patient while his weak fingers found a good hold, or he was going to have to supplement his natural defences with a weapon. There is a great deal at stake. His legs sting both with piss and where he has slapped them. He must extract what is left of his father from the tulip’s acid. He picks up the sword. Its rusted blade lives in a black holster with black tassels like an anemone. It reeks of death or the charity shop. A battalion of intricate lead figurines assemble at his flanks. He painted, every night for a month, their livery pink as the inside of his father’s mouth. Since Lancelot is too busy in the mirror and Galahad is asleep these pink warriors must serve as C’s army. They hail him with their tiny collective voice. He finds their enthusiasm and smallness unbearably moving in his eyes. For the first time an optimism over saving his father. The moment is ripe for an assault on the bedroom door. But there is a problem. What if he is captured? He himself would never torture his enemies on account of the chivalric code. He cannot be sure that his assailants would be so merciful. He has been practising levitation so that when he is captured and strapped to the spiked chair that his enemies reserve for their greatest foes his own weight will not destroy him. That is the canniness of vegetarianism. He himself is made of a cork-like material that is hollower than the other humans. His body has a consistency which is more like Perceval, who has blown in through the open window and who studies the framed photograph of Aston Villa and chews gum. Perceval picks up the claret-and-blue football from the floor with drooling curiosity and brings it to his mouth. It bounces off his teeth and lands near C’s most frightening assailant, the bookshelf. C is determined to resist these books, whatever it is in them that leaves his father drifting like a plastic bag through the house, not remotely beautiful. C realises that Perceval’s stupidity provides a distraction which is an opportunity to strike. By now his father is more flower than human. If he cannot make it to his father’s room in the morning C will find nothing but a pile of bones and pollen in the sheets. C’s own room is streaked with blood. He knows that it is Louise Nurding’s blood. But Louise’s body remains immaculate. C begins to suspect that the catastrophe is taking place not in his father’s bedroom but in his own bedroom. It is the quality of a human body that is called mass, a quality that a body cannot not possess, that pushes the body down everywhere there is contact with a surface of infinitely sharp unchivalric spikes. He makes the brave decision to shed Galahad’s armour. Now he is light and light enough to make a run for the bedroom door. He has cried a dry puddle on his face. Louise holds her arms towards him. He must deny himself and Louise the bliss of that embrace. He knows, suddenly, that the urine each night is precisely the same as the acid that the tulip secretes to dissolve the body of his father, even though it is not on a biology exam. He runs towards the door with one single aim, which is to climb inside the tulip that is carnivorous.)

 

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I am particularly susceptible to the pleasures of prologues, epistles to the reader, characters introduced only to tell stories about other people, pilgrims passing the time with what you are about to read. I like the feeling (of being misled).

To protect myself from it I placed it inside a frame.

In doing so I discovered C’s childish misapprehension (that the father required the son’s care) has grown up to become the truth. The father is dying. The child, of course, has moved away. He has children of his own.

The story opens with C’s father wondering how to break the news to his son, who he imagines, with fear and hope, is asleep in the next room, imagining his father.

‘All C needs to do is make it out of his bedroom,’ he begins, and the child is placed back inside the father (who is inside the child). We are safe.

 

Image © Bill Badzo

The post Camelot appeared first on Granta Magazine.

Marika Lindholm, co-editor of the new book We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor offers 5 tips to creating a more appealing and successful anthology.

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I recently had the honor of coediting the anthology We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor with Cheryl Dumesnil, Domenica Ruta, and Katherine Shonk. As editors of an anthology aimed at giving voice to a diverse community of solo moms, we plunged into our labor of love with passion and determination. Along the winding road to publication, we learned that anthologies are often overlooked or viewed as less worthy than other genres. Although many anthologies transcend this reputation in sales and literary merit, publishers and booksellers often say that readers buy books because of their dedication to a specific author, or perceive compilations as potentially containing more misses than hits. Inspired rather than defeated by this information, we set out to compile an honest representation of solo motherhood through powerful essays and poems—each one of them, in our view, a “hit.” We wanted the reader to be blown away by the writing, and by the heart and the breadth of experience shared by more than 70 solo mom writers.

Our dedication to We Got This is now being rewarded with media interest, a growing audience, and positive reviews, including a coveted starred review from Kirkus Reviews. If you have an anthology in your heart or are already working on one, don’t be daunted by the fact that they’re not the darlings of the literary world. Instead, focus on these five goals to ensure that your anthology gets the respect it deserves.

1. Love your content. Search far and wide for content that will make you proud to have your name attached to it in print. You need to love the material enough to defend it. When searching for essays and poems for We Got This, we cast a very wide net that included well-known and up-and-coming writers. We scoured the web and spread the word to our personal and professional networks that we were looking for original writing by solo moms. We also revisited published work to find our favorites, including work by deceased writers, such as Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Ruth Stone. We found plenty of content to fall in love with, then gave ourselves time to determine and defend each poem and essay’s value to the anthology. Some content, such as a hilarious excerpt from Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, was a favorite from the start, while others, including “Dad’s Day,” Lenlee Keep’s essay about honoring an ex who died from alcoholism, were last-minute discoveries. Now, of course, we can’t imagine our anthology without these voices.
2. Aim for a few literary rock stars. When people see that we have essays by Mary Karr, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Alexander, Ariel Gore, and other well-established writers, they often ask if we’re friends with these luminaries. We wish that were the case, but the truth is more pragmatic: We persistently reached out to their agents, publishers, and publicists to get permission to reprint their work. Once we got through to the individual or organization in charge of rights, we were rarely turned down. However, securing rights can be cumbersome, time-consuming, and expensive! For some of the big hitters, we had to secure not only U.S. rights, but also rights from England and South Africa. Permissions can add up, so figure out a budget in advance. We were lucky that some writers were kind enough to give us rights at no cost, based on their belief in our book. And a special shout-out to the poets who contributed: Overwhelmingly, they gave us rights for free. Shipping books to all our contributors was incredibly poignant because we knew that up-and-coming solo mom writers would be thrilled to see their names among literary rock stars.
3. Be a ruthless editor. This tip is fairly straightforward, but should not be underestimated. Don’t be afraid to edit original content and excerpts to manage the overall page length and keep your reader’s interest. We were particularly determined to keep each contribution short because busy solo moms don’t have time to read for long chunks of time. The book is designed to pick up for quick inspiration. It might seem presumptuous that we chose very short excerpts from writers like the brilliant Mary Karr, but that’s what had to be done. Our edits were not always popular with contributors, but we did our best to communicate the larger goal. And we believe that the finished product is a testament to the value of editing for the greater good.
4. Focus on representation and placement. It’s easy to become so immersed in your content that you overlook glaring omissions, in terms writers’ stories and identities. But editors need to be self-aware of representation to achieve an honest expression of their mission. We wanted to represent the diverse array of solo mom voices, yet even late into the compiling process, we found that we’d neglected a particular perspective. Focus and effort were required to find writing that represented the rich diversity of the solo mom community. Once we’d gathered all their stories, we ordered them by chapter in a way that made thematic sense. We didn’t cluster all divorced moms or all African American moms together, but instead divided our chapters around thematic experiences and made sure that each chapter represented a range of circumstances, whether it was a mom with a deployed husband, a lesbian mom’s dating story, or even a mom losing her partner to mental illness. Our quest for representation ensured that We Got This is honest and powerful.
5. Embrace collaboration. I was incredibly fortunate to be part of a dream team of editors. With each of us bringing unique experience and expertise to the project, we were definitively better than the sum of our parts. Any anthology, even one that has a single editor, will benefit from being intentional about collaboration, since collaborating with contributors and editors at your publishing house is necessary. For instance, although we were determined to edit ruthlessly, we still communicated with our authors so they were aware of the process. Four editors might sound like an organizational nightmare, but it was quite the opposite, for a number of reasons. First, there was so much work that it was great to divide up responsibilities. Second, as a collaborative team, the book’s best interest always surpassed personal opinions. Finally, as collaborators with diverse opinions and skills, we complemented one another, to the benefit of our book. A collaborative spirit carried us through the challenging parts, made our book better, and now remains one of the most inspiring outcomes of our journey. Thanks to the relationships we formed with each other and our authors, our contributors are enthusiastically promoting We Got This on social media and their own websites. They’re also raising their hands to read at our events, which are proving to be a true celebration of the solo mom community. Our anthology belongs to every solo mom who contributed to it, and that’s the way it should be.

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For ideas about how to create a fiction anthology, check out this WD article.

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Have personal experiences you want to share? WD University’s Writing the Personal Essay 101: Fundamentals will teach you how to avoid the dreaded responses of “so what?” and “I guess you had to be there” by utilizing sensory details, learn to trust your writing intuitions, and develop a skilled internal editor to help with revision. Register today!

The post 5 Goals for Making Your Anthology the Best That It Can Be by Marika Lindholm appeared first on Writer's Digest.

‘The Frogs Asking for a King’, like Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of the emperor’s new clothes, is a children’s story that also carries a strong political message. Often included in editions of Aesop’s fables, ‘The Frogs Asking for a King’ is summarised below, accompanied by a few words of […]

The post A Summary and Analysis of Aesop’s ‘The Frogs Asking for a King’ Fable appeared first on Interesting Literature.