12 March 2010
By Andrewj
In The Poet's Haven
I believe in poetry. I love it. It makes me feel good to write it. It makes me feel good to read it. I love the thought that there is something inside of me that expresses itself in a much more primal way than the straightforward text of my ordinary prose. For me, poetry is visceral. It comes from a different place inside of me. For me, poetry feels like a much more genuine expression of my thoughts and emotions than any other form of writing. My poetry tends to be rough-edged. I don’t sweat over every word. I don’t work to make every syllable of every poem perfect. I like my poems to be rawer than that.
My approach is not everyone’s approach. It isn’t even the predominant approach. Some people write poetry because they want to create something beautiful. They are attracted to poetry forms because they want to challenge themselves. They add constraints to their poetry such as meter, syllable counts, repetition, alliteration and even rhyme. They believe that constraint and rules give structure to their creativity. Those people are just as correct in their approach as I am in mine. That is the beauty of poetry. It can be so many things. There is no one right way to write poetry. There are academic styles, surrealist styles, emotional styles and a multitude of other styles.
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09 March 2010
By Morgan St. James
In Write On
Rosetta and friends circa 1926
Another Excerpt from “Remembering Rosetta,” a yet to be publish memoir. By Morgan St. James and Phylllice Bradner
Our mother Rosetta Lachman, born Rose Schwartz, almost made it to ninety-seven—she missed it by three and a half months. When she was in her mid-eighties, I encouraged her to write what will be the first section of this “still in work” memoir.
Rosetta’s family enjoyed longevity. The majority of her siblings lived into their nineties, and one brother, Al, reached one-hundred. The following is from Rosetta’s unedited hand written story with my comments at the end.
HOW I GOT MY NAME AND OTHER ELEMENTARY SCHOOL MEMORIES
When I was five years old it was time for me to go to school. My mother couldn’t take me because she never had a chance to go to night school and learn the language, so she was leery about answering the usual questions that were asked when registering a student.
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06 March 2010
By Perpetual Prose
In Author Spotlight
Larissa, tell us about the genres you write in.
I write dark paranormal romance, erotic sci-fi/paranormal romance (under the name Sydney Croft), and contemporary romance. The contemporaries and dark paranormals so far have had a medical element, which I just love.
How much impact has your passion for reading had on your writing career?
The most impact it could have. I write because I love to read and have since I was very young. I have always been a voracious reader with an active imagination, and I created my own worlds in my head — which I then decided to get out on paper. I wrote my first full-length novel at the age of 13…that’s how much I loved reading and writing!
You and Stephanie Tyler have co-written several paranormal fiction books. Why did you choose to use a pen name – Sydney Croft?
Well, our publisher requested that we do it. Since we were both unknowns, having no track record, no books published, we were asked to come up with a single name rather than using two. So we threw some ideas back and forth, and then settled on Sydney (from Alias’s Sydney Bristow,) and Croft (from Lara Croft, Tomb Raider.) We don’t even have our real names in the bio in the back of the books!
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03 March 2010
By Andrewj
In The Poet's Haven
Pain is personal. Pain is powerful. Pain is not original. Accepting the risk of hyperbole, I can say that all poets go through a pain period. All people, and thus all poets, suffer. You may be mistreated by a parent, rejected by a lover, betrayed by a friend or touched by death. These things happen, and when they happen, many people turn to poetry. They write about their pain. They express their anger, guilt or resentment. They work through their pain with poetry. It helps.
I’ve been through a few pain periods. I have several poems that I wrote while my mother fought for her life in a hospital for nearly six months. I’ve also used poetry to work through more than one failed relationship. I have written poetry to express my loneliness when I was staying in hotels week after week. I have written elegies to fallen friends and relatives. Writing poems about your pain provides perspective. It allows you to vent emotions. It can even provide some closure.
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28 February 2010
By Morgan St. James
In Write On
Excerpt from “Remembering Rosetta,” a yet to be published memoir. By Morgan St. James and Phylllice Bradner
Rosetta Lachman left this world just short of her ninety-seventh birthday. She was encouraged to write the first section of this “still in work” memoir when she was in her mid-eighties.
Rosetta’s family enjoyed longevity, most of them living into their nineties. The remaining brothers mentioned in the first paragraph lived to be ninety-seven, ninety-eight, one hundred and eighty-six respectively. The following is from Rosetta’s hand written story.
INTRODUCTION
Before I start my memoir, I must introduce myself. I am the youngest of a family of ten— seven brothers and two sisters. I was born in 1909. From the oldest to the youngest they were: Jean, Joe, Meyer, Sam, Sol, Al, Charlie, Edna, Philip, and me—Rosetta. Now there are five of us left. Myself and my brothers Meyer, Sam, Al, and Philip.
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26 February 2010
By Perpetual Prose
In Author Spotlight
How old were you when you started writing?
I wrote my first ‘book’ at six and my first poetry at nine. The book has survived and is now buried in a memory box; the poetry, thankfully, long ago parted this earth. All through childhood, the creative arts including drawing, painting, sketching, and of course writing interested me more than anything else; I was all the time at work making something. I can’t imagine not writing and always carry an ink pen and a notebook wherever I go.
What attracted you to the Paranormal Fiction genre?
I never intended to write in the paranormal genre. When I started getting serious about my writing, I just wrote – with genre being one fo the furthest things from my mind. As a matter of fact, I never thought about genre until I got the manuscript polished up and ready to shop to agents and publishers.
Tell us about your Harlan Vampires Series.
The characters in my stories are not your usual bloodthirsty Bram Stoker-type vampires. They are people with hopes and dreams, desires, drives, and life-crises – some major, some minor, but all of which help push the characters into growth and understanding. I’ve written “3 and 3/4″ stories in this series. I haven’t been able to finish the fourth book because the narrative became too difficult for me to handle at the stage of writing skills I had at the time and because I got the brilliant idea to write a series prequel that is also still unfinished. However, the first book is being shopped, and I’m in the process of re-editing the second.
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23 February 2010
By Andrewj
In Contests
A story told in 100 or 200 words starts to read a lot like poetry. All of the excess thoughts have been eliminated. There is no room for wasted words when the count is so tight. To me, that is one of the advantages of good poetry over prose. Every word matters. It is a lot of fun.
A poem doesn’t have to tell a story. Pantoums, for example, don’t feel like a story. The use of repetition makes them feel more like a thought that simply won’t go out of your head. There are also nonsense poems, chants, list poems, imagist poems and a variety of other forms and approaches that are not about the story. Even the prose poem, which takes on the look of a story with its use of paragraphs and other prose structures, generally reflects thoughts more than story.
If you choose to tell a story with your poetry, you will find yourself looking at a narrative that winds through your poem. Events happen in succession. There are some poems in which a line or a stanza can easily be moved because the poem doesn’t progress along the lines of a plot. If the poem tells a story, however, there is generally a flow between lines and paragraphs that only makes sense in order.
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19 February 2010
By Perpetual Prose
In Contests
Have you ever had the urge to write your life story as a keepsake for yourself or your family?
Whether you aspire to publication, or want to preserve memories for yourself or family members and friends, memoirs are priceless. Without them, the wonderful times and recollections of people along the way, fade into obscurity.
You don’t have to be a famous author or a movie star, politician or captain of industry to have a story that will be of interest. Many people feel there was nothing interesting in their lives, and ask, “What can I write?” Well, there are many possibilities including favorite childhood toys, crushes, adult embarrassments, achievements and even forbidden exploits.
Write about something that had a meaning for you. Maybe your purpose is to let future generations know what it was like when you were young. Maybe you just have some special experiences to share. Time passes so quickly. Does today’s generation relate to what it was like not to have a cell phone with multiple applications at their beck and call? Where would Superman have been in today’s world. Most likely arrested for indecent exposure!
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16 February 2010
By Andrewj
In Contests
All any one knows for sure is that it must rhyme. That’s usually the first entry in a non-poet’s personal lexicon when they recognize something as being a poem. Of course, we know that a great deal of poetry does rhyme, but a lot of it doesn’t. You may be hard-pressed to find a poem that rhymes in a contemporary poetry journal.
Another supposed criterion of “that which makes something a poem” is often meter, which is just a not-too-fancy word for the beat, or rhythm of the line — all lines of spoken text have a meter, although when something is said to be written “in meter” it usually means that it is written in a regular meter. The meter is just the differential between stressed and unstressed syllables.
For example, the word “cucumber” would have a hard stress followed by two softer, “unstressed” syllables. The word “diagonal” would have an unstressed syllable (DI) followed by a hard stress (AG) followed by two unstressed syllables (ON AL) – although you may have noticed that the “DI” is actually somewhat stressed, although not as much as the “AG.”
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13 February 2010
By Morgan St. James
In Write On
How do you portray an eighty-year-old woman who isn’t your garden variety grandmother? With flat narrative, or through vivid descriptions and attitudes. I chose to use an excerpt from one of my own books to illustrate this. We are introduced to Flossie Silver, a former vaudeville magician, in “A Corpse in the Soup.” Flossie is anything but a typical Jewish mother, so here goes:
MORGAN ST. JAMES AND PHYLLICE BRADNER – A CORPSE IN THE SOUP
We used a word picture to communicate that the Silver Sisters’ eighty-year-old, but young-at-heart, mother is not only old but quirky and, unlike many old people, able to let go of what’s familiar. We could have simply said, “Flossie sold her kitschy cottage to a porn movie producer and moved to Beverly Hills.”
Flossie’s still-sparkling blue eyes glazed over for a moment. Her focus wasn’t what it used to be.
She was thinking about the 1930’s pastel stucco on Martel Avenue with its layered shingled roof, stained glass front window and little turret.
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