Every Wednesday, Robert Lee Brewer shares a prompt and an example poem to get things started on the Poetic Asides blog. This week, write a clear poem.
For today’s prompt, write a clear poem. There are many ways to interpret what clear could mean. For starters, there are clear nail colors and clear plastic containers. Of course, clear directions are easy to follow. Clear weather is pretty nice. Clearing the air can help mend disputes. So clear your throat, clear your mind, and write your clear poem today.
Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.
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Poem your days away with Robert Lee Brewer’s Smash Poetry Journal. This fun poetic guide is loaded with 125 poetry prompts, space to place your poems, and plenty of fun poetic asides.
The deer hesitate before emerging into the clearing. They see me, but I’ve been here before, and we have an understanding. Per usual, they look and eat, look and eat. A head raises and sniffs the air, always ready to bolt back to the dark cover of the woods, always making sure alls clear, and for this moment, it is.
It’s time to look ahead to the New Year! After experiencing a year unlike any other, there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel. Due to unprecedented circumstances, you may not have been able to meet your writing goals this past year—but here’s your opportunity for a fresh start! The expert planners and strategists at Writer’s Relief have some tips to help you keep all your writing resolutions in the New Year.
How To Keep Your Writing Resolutions
Set A New Routine—Or Refine Your Current One! It’s hard to resist the urge to check our favorite websites, social media, or e-mail inbox for updates. But click on that cute cat video for “just a second” and before you know it, all the time you blocked out for writing has vanished! Free browser-based website blockers like LeechBlock can help you eliminate distractions by blocking the sites that tend to distract you from your writing.
If you realize that writing every day in the evening doesn’t work with your other responsibilities, try a different day or time, or even once a week. Having a scheduled writing time that you can stick to will make it easier for you to keep to your routine.
To further enforce your new writing routine, designate a new spot in your home as your work area. If you used to write in your bedroom, try sitting at a window in the living room, or even at the kitchen table—as long as there aren’t more distractions in those locations.
Get Organized: It’s important to clearly define your writing goals. Is there a certain word count you want to reach during each writing session? Are there improvements you want to incorporate into your newsletter or the latest piece you’re writing? Make a list of your goals and keep it handy so you can easily refer to it and check your progress. Bonus: Each goal you mark “done” will give you a sense of accomplishment and will keep you motivated!
Recharge: When planning your new writing schedule, be sure to set aside time to do activities that will help boost your creativity. Try freewriting or other creative writing exercises. You can also do non-writing activities to recharge and inspire your writing: meditate, attempt the thirty circles challenge, or just people-watch!
Gain New Skills: There are many free apps and affordable online courses that can help improve your writing skills. Joanna Penn has a number of paid courses such as “How to Write a Novel.” If you’re feeling daring, try The Most Dangerous Writing App!
Connect With Other Writers: Having other writers to encourage and support you will make it easier to meet your writing goals. You can find writers’ groups on Facebook, including our very own Writer’s Relief Café! There are also online writing groups like Critique Circle and Story Write that offer critique and feedback on your writing. Joining a local writing group is another great way to connect with other writers and get constructive feedback on your writing—many of these local groups also have online meetings.
The New Year is a great opportunity to start fresh, reenergize your writing, and work with renewed dedication toward achieving your goals. With these five easy tips for keeping your writing resolutions, you’ll be ready to write, submit, and boost your odds of getting published in the months ahead!
And when you’re ready to submit your short stories, personal essays, poems, or book, Writer’s Relief is ready to help you meet your publishing goals. Learn more here!
Question: What are your writing resolutions for the New Year? How do you plan to stay on track?
When you’re ready to submit short stories, poetry, or personal essays to literary journals, it’s important to check the guidelines for phrases such as we do not accept work that is previously published, or submit previously unpublished work only. Why? Because most literary editors are not interested in publishing something that’s already appeared elsewhere. But what does previously published really mean? The answer to this question has become increasingly hard to pin down as the Internet takes on a huge role in the writing world. Fortunately, the submissions experts at Writer’s Relief can help you determine what’s considered previously published.
What Does—And Doesn’t—Count As “Previously Published”
Physically printed and distributed: This is the most basic definition of “previously published.” If your poems, stories, or essays appeared in a book, journal, anthology, textbook, newsletter, newspaper, magazine, or any other print publication, it is considered published. Does this include your high school or college literary journal? Yes, it does.
Available to the public digitally: One of the main reasons so many literary journal editors don’t like previously published work is that they want their offerings to be fresh and new to their audience. Editors want to be the first to discover your writing. So if your work is available online—whether through an online literary journal, a digital archive like Wattpad, a social media platform, a website, or a personal blog—most editors will consider it previously published. Also, editors would prefer to stay away from any rights entanglements.
What if you take your writing off the site or platform? Often, even though you’ve removed your work, it may be cached elsewhere on the Internet and still show up in searches. Google and other search engines will often archive old Web pages, so simply deleting something from the Internet doesn’t mean it’s gone. If you remove a short story, essay, or poem from the Internet, do a search of random lines from the work to see if it’s appearing anywhere.
No one can stop you from taking your work down and then submitting it, but be warned: Editors may not like this tactic. And if an editor finds your “unpublished” work online, you might look irresponsible or, worse, devious.
Our best advice: Don’t post your work online if you plan to submit it for publication in a literary journal.
Posted on a private critique forum: If the forum, board, or workshopping site is private and intended for the purposes of encouraging feedback or community support, most editors and literary agents will probably consider the work unpublished. But just to be safe, you may want to take it down once you’ve received feedback so it doesn’t appear online.
If the forum in question is public (that is, if nonmembers can see what you’ve written), then your work will likely be considered previously published.
Posted on my own author website: Having samples of your writing on your author website is a great way to entice new readers and literary agents who may be researching your work and online presence. But, as you may have guessed, whatever short stories or poems you post on your public author website will be considered previously published by literary editors. And don’t post your work on your website and then plan to take it down and start submitting to journals. Remember, that won’t necessarily stop your writing from showing up in an Internet search. The best approach is to only post writing that has already been published (after the publication rights revert back to you, of course).
An alternative is to write stories or poems specifically for your website, with no intention to publish them elsewhere. This approach could also provide an incentive for readers to come back to your website for new, original content.
Self-published in print or e-book format: If you’ve self-published a book or novel on your own or with a third-party POD publishing house, and you still retain the copyright, you can pitch it to most literary agents. That said, always be forthcoming about your book’s history—and you may need to remove your book from online bookstores and take your book down from the Internet.
Book excerpt in a literary journal: Publishing a passage from your book in a journal shouldn’t disqualify your book from agent representation. As long as your excerpt is a small section from your book—maybe a chapter or two—agents will know that there is still a lot of untapped potential in your book. In fact, successfully publishing an excerpt can boost your chances of securing an agent, since it shows you have an audience who is interested in your book’s story.
What if your work is considered “previously published”?
Keep in mind that these are general guidelines: Each literary editor may have his or her own definition of what is considered previously published. Most literary journals list what they consider previously published in their submission guidelines—so always check before you send your work!
If you realize your writing is previously published, don’t give up yet. There are a few journal editors who do accept previously published works. Be sure to be upfront about your publication history. Editors will check to see if your work shows up in searches, and if you don’t let them know your story or poem has already been published, you’ll earn a poor reputation in the industry. Editors DO talk to each other!
As a general rule, if you plan to submit your work to literary journals and magazines, DON’T post it publicly online first—anywhere. Then you won’t have to worry about whether you’ve inadvertently become “previously published.”
In other countries, Alice Munro’s book Who Do You Think You Are? was published under the title The Beggar Maid, which is unfortunate – it sucks something essential from the book – since ‘who do you think you are?’ must be the most Canadian title, the most Canadian question. ‘Who do you think you are?’ we used to say when I was growing up, sometimes followed by, ‘the Queen of England?’ A demand posed of those who dared to express desire, pride or some other innocent form of self-determination. The royal reference is at once scornful and reverent – colonial jokes, with their complex subtexts and subjects.
‘Who does she think she is?’ or ‘She really thinks she’s something, doesn’t she?’. It’s usually a she – a particular, subtle yet existential kind of shaming – a diffuse embarrassment, for an ambiguous wanting. And, in fact, an unanswerable question. What would one say?
Munro’s book of linked stories, about a girl and then woman named Rose, begins and ends with this question. ‘Royal Beatings’ is a story about Rose’s childhood in Hanratty, a small town in Southern Ontario – West Hanratty, is where they live, the ‘poor part of town’ that runs from ‘factory workers and foundry workers down to large improvident families of casual bootleggers and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves.’ Flo, Rose’s stepmother who runs a general store, is irritated with Rose, and says she’ll get her father to give her a ‘royal beating’: ‘Oh, don’t you think you’re somebody, says Flo, and a moment later, Who do you think you are?’ Rose protests, as she does in the final titular story of the book, recalling a teacher who asked her the same thing after she stands in front of the class and flawlessly recites a poem. ‘The lesson she was trying to teach her was more important than any poem,’ Rose later understands, ‘and one she truly believed Rose needed. It seemed that many other people believed she needed it too’.
The lesson is never entirely clear, but it has something to do with wordless prohibition and shame – a feeling, texture, substance, a character in itself that runs through all the stories in the book. Rose is always a fish out of water, always wondering if she has managed to finally become someone else, or if people can still see something true, fated, unbearable, shamefully hopeful at her centre. Munro’s subtle brilliance in rendering Rose’s life – from childhood poverty to scholarship girl to marriage, mother, divorce, to TV interviewer, university lecturer, primetime actor – is that each story proceeds with self-aware, sometimes pastiche and parodic prose. The narrative wrestles with itself to find a different language in which Rose might live, hoping, like Rose, that if it performs with enough commitment and brio, a new character, a new life will come into being.
I was disturbed, several years ago, to read a review of a new Munro book in which the critic described her entire oeuvre as depressing, shabby, grubby, filled with poverty and dull lives that inevitably descend into interminable sadness; as well as an obsession with a kind of ‘realism’, by way of her obsessive interest in domestic interiors. Which, of course, is actually an interest in class and the social, material, cultural forces that shape an individual and how she experiences the world. Could he not see how funny the books were? Or that the characters themselves do not believe their lives poor or sad, but rather simply their lives: complex, disappointing, bizarre, stupid, radiant, just like anyone else?
Rose is deeply comedic, awkward, hopeful, full of accident, bad jokes, transparent attempts at cleverness and sophistication, of which she is intensely aware. Munro’s narrative tone is at once immersive and retrospective, rueful – a version of what it’s like to remember one’s past. ‘The thing she was ashamed of, in acting, was that she might have been paying attention to the wrong things, reporting antics, when there was always something further, a tone, a depth, a light, that she couldn’t get and wouldn’t get,’ Rose realises, in the final story of the collection. ‘And it wasn’t just about acting she suspected this. Everything she had done could sometimes be seen as a mistake.’
My mother, also a writer, gave me Munro to read as a young person – a gift, a treasure – and also an insight into her own work, her own past and identifications. I have sometimes thought of these stories as stories about my mother – who was born, like Munro, in Seaforth, Huron County, Ontario – although they are not. I have read them so often that sometimes I cannot remember what is mine and what is hers – Munro’s, Rose’s, my mother’s. Did I go to that party in Kingston, with pretentious staff and students from Queen’s University? Did I tell the off-colour joke that fell flat and offended other guests? Was it me who wore those embarrassing clothes, too much eyeshadow, laughed too loudly? Did I want love, to distraction? Do I believe that a story can be found anywhere, hidden in the barest folds of any moment? And who, after all, do I think I am?
There is an anecdote that Munro initially wrote the stories in Who Do You Think You Are? as separate, each a different woman, but woke one morning with the idea that they were in fact all the same woman, and so she became. How time passes, what makes a person. The simple, extraordinary idea that the woman in these stories is and is not the same Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose.
WD editor Moriah Richard outlines the short short form and answers the question, “What is flash fiction?”
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
You may have heard of this six-word short short story; it’s often attributed to Ernest Hemmingway, though his authorship of the piece has never been confirmed.
Six words. So many emotions.
This is the goal of flash fiction—also referred to as micro-fiction, short short stories, or sudden fiction. Instead of focusing on plot or character development, the writer instead focuses on the narrative’s movement. Every sentence, every word, should reveal something to the reader that we did not know before. It should also hint at a larger backstory than what’s revealed on the page.
While flash fiction has been around for centuries (think of Aesop’s Fables or other collections of folk tales), it has recently garnered a lot of attention from writers and publishers. Despite this, the form itself isn’t well-defined. The general consensus among writers and publishers is that anything between 5 and 1,500 words is flash fiction.
Beyond that, flash fiction is employed by writers of all genres; horror, science fiction, fantasy, thriller/suspense, literary, YA, and even romance writers have all produced some excellent work in under 1,500 words.
To help you better understand the form, here are some excellent articles by flash authors on the WD site:
Last year was a difficult one, but there were at least 40 up sides: debut authors, with fresh voices and viewpoints, whose work offered us perspective or escape. As the calendar turns over, the problems we faced last year still linger, but a new group of writers are set to introduce their work to readers across the globe.
Whether you’re seeking a revealing memoir about family secrets or a short story collection about women all named Sarah, the first half of 2021 offers something new for everyone.
Robert Jones, Jr.’s debut novel is about a forbidden romantic relationship between two Black men enslaved on a Mississipi plantation during the Antebellum. Jones explores queerness through a new lens that has rarely been explored in literature. The Prophets is one of the most powerful Black queer historical novels ever written.
Torrey Peters’s first full-length novel is about searching for connection and family while navigating the challenges of gender. Ames thought detransitioning would give him a happy, unremarkable life, but it may have wrecked his relationship. His partner Reese wants a child, but doesn’t know how to have the family with Ames that she envisioned with Amy. The result is a domestic drama filled with tangled lives for modern times.
A decade after leaving Argentina, a man returns home under less-than-ideal circumstances: the first woman he loved is dying. His return isn’t a rosy homecoming, but one where he must confront the ghosts of his past while grappling with the man he has become in America.
Set in present-day Los Angeles and a 1990s British boarding school, Ellie Eaton’s book carefully examines the destructive relationships of teenage girls. At the center is Josephine, a freelance writer who was one of the private school’s biggest bullies. Revisiting the shuttered school in her 30s, she begins to dig into her own past and grapple with the decisions she made decades ago.
In her debut memoir, Nadia Owusu invites readers into her globe-spanning childhood and young adulthood. After her mother abandoned her as a toddler, Owusu’s father, a U.N. official, brought his children and his new wife from continent to continent, until his death when the author was 13. This memoir follows her to Rome, Dar-es-Salaam, London, Kampala, New York, and elsewhere as she comes to term with her family tragedies and her own identity.
After her mother dies during alcohol treatment, Geller returns to the Florida Navajo reservation where she grew up and finds a suitcase packed with photos, diaries, letters, and personal ephemera. Using her experience as a librarian and archivist, Geller digs into her family history, mixingher own narrative with the story she derives from her mother’s documents.
Throughout these sublime stories, Dantiel W. Moniz explores love and loss with grace. The stories center on Floridian women and girls trying to find their place in the world—from a teenager resisting her restrictive church to two sisters transporting their father’s ashes.
Just after the 2016 election, a woman’s relationship falls apart when she discovers her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist. Her own truths and beliefs begin to unravel after she flees to Berlin and catches herself becoming more secretive and manipulative with those around her.
Te-Ping Chen’s story collection is an expansive look at modern China, as it struggles with the influence of the past and envisions a new future. Chen offers both realism and magical realism throughout the collection, which allows her to tackle her vision of Chinese culture with both clear-eyed practicality and dreamlike allegory—for instance, a strange new fruit that brings on troubling memories of the Cultural Revolution when eaten.
Novelist David Tromblay’s debut memoir investigates his relationship with his alcoholic father, and the long shadow cast on his family by the boarding schools in which Native American children like his grandmother were indoctrinated and abused. He explores his family legacy of anger and trauma to figure out how he survived to become the man he is.
Sebastian Mote is a 35-year-old gay high school teacher who just wants to settle down and have kids and maybe a white picket fence. Why is that so hard? At a wedding, he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham, also a proud gay man, who dismisses Sebastian’s yearnings for a marriage and babies as heteronormative. Oscar is upset at the rise of bachelorette parties at gay bars and the mainstreaming of queer culture. Sebastian and Oscar are both attracted and repelled by each other’s life choices, both struggling to find their place and to envision a meaningful future for themselves. Set in the weeks after the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Let’s Get Back to the Party is an insightful novel about what it means to be a gay man in a rapidly-changing America.
Jakob Guanzon’s novel follows a down-in-their-luck father and son who are evicted from their trailer and living in a truck. Abundance takes a critical and unsentimental look at the harsh effects of poverty in a country that’s seemingly teeming with abundance.
A brother and sister come together in their childhood home after their mother passes away to pack things up and move on with their lives. The brother is on a self-destructive path and the sister tries everything in her power to save him, including coming up with a bet that may save his life.
The Recent East is a multigenerational story that starts with a family who escapes East Germany for upstate New York. After the Berlin Wall falls, their daughter Beate Haas is told that she can reclaim her parents’ abandoned house in their hometown of Kritzhagen.
In this essay collection, for readers of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jia Tolentino, Jesse McCarthy covers topics ranging from trap music to Kehinde Wiley’s paintings. Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? highlights his keen eye as he observes the intersection between art, race, literature, and politics.
“Beware their ambition, their ugliness, their insatiable hunger, their ferocious rage.”What does it mean to be a monstrous woman? To be a woman who is too ambitious, too hungry, too angry, too ugly to fit into the societal norms dictated by our patriarchal society? In her book, Electric Literature’s editor-in-chief Jess Zimmerman analyzes feminism through eleven female monsters from Greek legends to build a new mythology: one where the hero is a monstrous woman with power and agency.
Sarahland is a queer experimental reimagining of selfhood; nearly every story in this collection is about a woman named Sarah. Sam Cohen tackles so much in this wide ranging book of Sarah origin stories, as one Sarah plays dead for a wealthy necrophiliac while another uses her Buffy fan-fiction to process her emotions.
Set mainly in present-day Miami, Gabriela Garcia’s novel is about Carmen who harbors ghosts from her past and her daughter Jeanette who is struggling with addiction. The two make decisions—including taking in the daughter of a neighbor who was detained by ICE—that begin to tear their relationship apart. Their relationship implodes when Jeanette travels to Cuba and learns unforgivable truths about her mother from her grandmother who stayed behind.
Pitched as The Glass Castle meets Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this Southern memoir follows J. Nicole Jones as she grows up in a family that swings from extreme wealth to extreme poverty in South Carolina. On the outside, their family is perfect, but behind closed doors, violence and anger erupt.
The sudden death of two teenagers reverberates through a small town in Washington State. The mystery deepens with the arrival of a pregnant 16-year-old stranger who might be the key in solving what happened.
A multigenerational novel that spans decades and continents, The Parted Earth looks at how the Partition of India and Pakistan left an indelible mark on three generations of women. Enjeti crafts a compelling story about the search to uncover ancestral secrets and the quest for belonging.
In their satire about social media, Alex McElroy provides a darkly humorous dissection into public personas. The novel follows a failed social media influencer and a struggling actor who create The Atmosphere, a cult-like rehabilitation center for toxic white men hoping for absolution. However, like their careers, things don’t go as planned and take a turn for the worse almost immediately.
We all have mythologies that we build around our parents. Lilly Dancyger (editor of the anthology Burn it Down: Women Writing About Anger)worshiped her father Joe, a brilliant East Village sculptor in the grip of a heroin addiction. After her father’s sudden death when she was a young girl, Lilly becomes self-destructive. Years later, she uses his artwork to reexamine the mythology she built about her father and to understand who exactly was Joe Schactman.
Zakiya Dalila Harris tackles #PublishingSoWhite in her novel about two Black women working in book publishing. Editorial assistant Nella, the only Black employee at Wagner Books, is thrilled at the prospect of finally having a kinship with a fellow Black colleague when Hazel is hired and becomes her cubicle-mate. But not long after Hazel’s arrival, threatening notes start appearing on Nella’s desk.
In this introspective Hong Kong-Canadian novel about grieving and difficult familial relationships, an unnamed narrator examines the ramifications of growing up in an “astronaut” family with a father who stayed in Hong Kong as a breadwinner while his wife and children moved permanently to Canada.
Bewilderness follows Irene and Lucy, coworkers in a pool hall in rural North Carolina. The two young women, already magnetically attracted to each other, form a bond after an impulsive plot to exact revenge on a customer who was being a creep to them. Their codependent friendship intensifies over the highs of popping opioid pills and scamming drug dealers to fuel their growing addiction. But what happens when the person who has been enabling your addiction wants to get clean and leaves you behind?
Struggling playwright Jonah Keller is living in a shitty Bushwick apartment and barely getting by on his menial restaurant pay. Buteverything seems finally to be going his way after Jonah carefully crafts a “chance” meeting with a Pulitzer prize-winning writer so he can further his ambitions. As their torrid affair spills over into the summer in the Hamptons, Jonah begins to notice all might not be what it seems with his older lover. The predator quickly becomes the prey in this tense page-turner. A riveting queer novel, Yes, Daddy takes a critical look at the way power imbalances play out in relationships.
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