Online Exclusives
Finding the Form with Janice McCrum
For me writing starts with an image I can’t get rid of, or a group of words that keep repeating themselves and won’t let me be. I have no idea where I’m going when I put the image into words, or when I record the line that’s almost become a mantra in my head. But […]
Finding the Form with Alexander Hollenberg
The germ of “Surgeon’s Knot” came, from all places, a lecture I was delivering on Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. If there’s one central, broken-record theme to all my teaching, it’s this: think hard about the relationship between form and content. On this particular day I was making my case for Pope’s sophisticated […]
Megan Callahan’s Writing Space
I once had a creative writing teacher who said he could write anywhere, as long as he had a window. At the time, I nodded and thought, of course! Who could write without a swatch of sky? A dusty sunbeam or street-side view? It seemed intuitive, somehow, that my creativity would be stunted without these […]
Finding the Form with William Ross
Our family, a Caucasian father, a Chinese mother and two mixed-race children, is fortunate to take part in the annual holidays and celebrations of two cultures. For example, we enjoy two different New Year celebrations. One occurs on the last day of December and the first day of January according to the Gregorian calendar. The […]
Of pantsers, plotters, and being of use
I want to be a plotter. Oh, how I want to be a plotter. In the way I want my car to stay clean or to keep my spice drawer organized, I want to be a plotter. Each time I start a new project, I delude myself with an outline and visions of stepwise arguments, […]
What’s John Adames Reading?
The death of Louise Glück this year and her winning the Nobel Prize prompted me to reread two volumes of her poetry – The Wild Iris and The Seven Ages – that I had purchased many years ago from the famous City Lights Books in San Francisco. One of my favorite poems from The Seven […]
Finding the Form with Susan J. Atkinson
Kiss Me Again Like The Second Time was one of those rare gems of a poem that start with a tiny spark that instantly ignites and the next thing you know the spark has exploded into a full blown fire or, in this case, a poem. I’d been reading a New York Bestseller Rom-Com, which […]
Finding the Form with Bobbie Jean Huff
I wrote what would become my short story “Generations” many years ago. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my writing then, but I knew enough to realize that it wasn’t any good. A story about a garden party? Who cares! When I first started writing, I focused on poetry. I’d never considered writing […]
Finding the Form with Jill Solnicki
In her Finding the Form online exclusive blog post, Jill Solnicki talks about her process, and reveals drafts of her poem “Blue Rooms”. Finding the form of a poem is both a conscious process, and a mysterious one. Why mysterious? Because, for me, a poem seems to arrive from above, out of air, or from […]
Finding the Form with Colette Maitland
It is in the doing, i.e. process, that I discover a story’s form. For me, form almost always springs from character development. The more time I invest getting to know my character or characters, the clearer the path forward. Case in point: Miss Touchy Feely (MTF), who appeared in a previous story, Overtime, where […]
