After the Art is the novel brainchild of essayist Randon Billings Noble. They seek “personal review essays that explore the ways reading can enrich the experience of looking at art.”The idea is essentially honoring a form of review where the“I” is not hidden but fully present in the shared experience of art. Submissions should fall between 500 and 1500 words. They publish quarterly, and the next deadline is May 15th. Brevity is a gem. They pay writers $45 to publish their creative essays of 750

Recently the desire to lie has wiggled itself into some of my nonfiction writing projects and forced me into a space where I’m writing between genres, the realms of the fictional and the fact-based. This experience begs the question - when do we make our true stories fictional? In a recent revision workshop at The Attic Institute, I shared my short childhood-memoir piece for critique and the class unanimously agreed that my mother was not present enough in the piece. They wanted to see her in s

This is a great anthology for anyone interested in writing exploring marginalized identity through the essay form. “The title,” say editors Suleyman and Shukla, “was a response to the narrative that immigrants are ‘bad’ by default until they prove themselves otherwise.” The last essay by Jenny Chang, “How to Center Your Own Story,” is an in-depth step-by-step guide to centering your story as a person of color in America-- where that identity is so often questioned, and her guide is the perfect e

There are so many ways to approach a piece of writing after the first draft. The needs of each story or poem will be different. But revision does not have to be daunting. Revision can be a playful process. Having already gone through the hail-storm of getting out the first draft, you can finally take it apart, discover direction and meaning. Some writers will tell us not a single similarity from a first draft should carry over to the second. Others, save only a few of the best lines and use the

Writing rejection is specific– it isn’t like not getting a promotion. Or being dumped. It isn’t technically supposed to ever be personal but it can certainly feel that way. Yet dealing with rejection in a practical way lacks the same dialogue. No one writes a book about getting writing rejections. I received a rejection recently, arguably more difficult than other rejections because an editor gave me feedback and asked for a revision, but rejected the new draft; I’d let my hopes reach greater h

In my first personal essay workshop, our instructor wanted us to know what differentiated personal essay from other forms of nonfiction—specifically memoir, even if we choose to eventually throw the “rules” out the nearest window. At first, I was skeptical; the forms seemed so similar. They were both short in length, and both personal in content, so why did it matter? On a practical level, this understanding would help us when we finally started to submit work. For example, if a literary magazin

Almost five years ago I attended the Portland Book Festival in downtown Portland, Oregon. On the balcony of a church across from the art museum, I watched as Sandra Cisneros, true writing icon and the author of one of my favorite story collections, was answering raised hands in the audience. One high school student on a field trip with their class asked Cisneros for her advice to young writers.

Jennifer Robin’s feminist gonzo nonfiction collection, Earthquakes in Candyland, is a series of disruptions; from essay to micro-flash, Robin takes the position of an intimate journalist, combining observation and interviews with poetic vignettes and philosophical inquiry that push us to question ourselves and our role as humans. Many of the longer pieces in the book follow in the style of Robin’s statement in the story “Oxy’s Midnight Runners”: “I’m here to hear stories,” she says to her inter

Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut collection of flash...is a journey through desire’s relationship with the body: the exhaustion after desire courses through us, and the surprising places—both hidden and public—desire centers itself...

When I Spoke In Tongues, by Jessica Wilbanks Review by Lily Blackburn That some believe in a spiritual language, one that negates form but can be coaxed from silence – connecting one to a higher power – is the source of both seduction and doubt for Jessica Wilbanks in her memoir When I Spoke in Tongues. Wilbanks down-to-earth eloquence draws us into the intimacy of her family and community before slowly revealing the growth of her doubt and the emotionally arduous process of untangling a self