Submit Your Slush Pile Entry by October 10, 2023
Submit Your Slush Pile Entry by October 10, 2023 Writers’ Morning Out is now accepting submissions for the October 14 Slush Pile event. This meeting is one of the highlights of the Writers’ Morning Out calendar. The Premise: It is 4 PM on a Friday afternoon, and three editors must triage a pile of unsolicited manuscripts […]
2023 Flash Prose Guidelines
2023 Flash Prose Guidelines Writers’ Morning Out will begin accepting submissions for the thirteenth annual Flash Prose contest on August 1. Contest rules encourage writers to read and follow guidelines when submitting. Publishers and agents assume writers who cannot follow guidelines will be hard to work with. Who wants to work with someone who’s difficult? […]
Romance: Top Selling Genre
Jody Savage, author of Brilliant Charming Bastard: The Best Revenge is Getting Rich, introduced us to Romance, the highly structured yet creative, best-selling genre. She emphasized that Romance is about relationships far more than exoticism. The genre is character-driven—in contrast to say thrillers—and always begins with conflicts, both within the main characters and between them. […]
Structure in Storytelling
Structure – the architecture that supports your story.
Chapbooks Aren’t Just for Poetry
Amy Sayre Batista, Primitivity (fiction), Judith Stanton, Deer Diaries (poetry), Ralph Earle, The Way the Rain Works (poetry), and Ruth Moose Tea (poetry) talked about chapbooks, saying that putting together their collections made the individual pieces and their work in general stronger. What is the history of chapbooks? Chapbooks began popular in the 1600s […]
Purple Prose, Throat Clearing and Info Dump–oh my~
At the April 9, 2022 Slush Pile event, our panel of three editors/agents responded to twelve very interesting entries. Noah Stetzer, a poet and editor at Bull City Press, Tracy Crowe of Tracy Crowe Literary Agency, and Ty Stumpf, a poet, editor, and chair of the English Department at CCCC—all treated us to an […]
What is a Poem?
This is the question Tom Dow asks his students. He asked again during the March WMO’s lead-up to National Poetry Month. Three poets, Anne Kissel, Judith Stanton, and Mark MacAllister provided their answers before reading one of their poems. They addressed this question in different ways. Anne Kissel said the question made her wonder: […]
Find the Story in Your Story
In her January 2022, presentation, ‘I ‘vs. ‘Eye’: Tracy Crow discussed balancing the external with the internal Most all writing—fiction, nonfiction, poem—combines both the ‘I’ and the ‘Eye.’ But what does that mean? The ‘eye’ is what is happening, occurring in the physical world—the external. The ‘eye’ is the experience being witnessed, observed; […]
Examples of Ekphratic Writing
The Big Push By John Glenday after Sir Herbert James Gunn ‘The Eve of the Battle of the Somme’ Would you believe it, there’s a bloke out there singing ‘When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day’. His audience, a sixty-pounder crew, stand round bleeding from the ears. The Boche are all […]