Suspend Your Disbelief

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A Room of Her Own

by Lee Thomas

Attention all ladies: A Room of Her Own (AROHO) has a trio of great awards coming up in January and beyond. The foundation for women writers & artists, whose mission encompasses empowering, educating, and encouraging women writers and artists, features their spring Orlando Prize, with submissions closing on January 31. AROHO writes: AROHO’s Orlando Prizes for unpublished poetry, short fiction, flash fiction and nonfiction celebrate Virginia Woolf’s title character’s liberation from the restraints of time and gender. AROHO’s new array of competitions is an invitation of women writers to manifest their own escapades “in gardens running down to the river, […]


Interviews |

Many Voices: An Interview with Tracy Chevalier

by Felicity Librie

In her conversation with novelist Tracy Chevalier, Felicity Librie uncovers how research fuels the process of character development, how the past sheds light on our present moment, and why Chevalier will never tire of getting lost on a journey of discovery.


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Inspiration 2.011

by Lee Thomas

One of my favorite elements of FWR’s author interviews has got to be reading about what inspires other writers. Some of us get lost in years of research, some just get out into the world and make friends on the bus, some can’t say enough about delving into nonfiction, science journals, trips to the ballet – you name it. Writing is a passion that feeds off other passions. You can definitely feel this as a reader. Sometimes, sitting in front of blank document, I long for the days of the high school essay prompt. My English teacher senior year, Ms. […]


Shop Talk |

Save Time to Save Words

During the holidays, everyone seems to be rushing to get something or other done. If it’s not buying presents or attending parties, many of us are traveling to visit friends and family. And at least here in Michigan, where winter has set in, people are hurrying everywhere, trying to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible. But getting there is half the fun, right? Earlier this year, the Oxford English Dictionary launched its “Save the Words” campaign. It promises to make getting around (alas, only conversationally) more fun while saving words that are falling out of […]


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Book of the Week: In a Strange Room, by Damon Galgut

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Elegies for the Brokenhearted, by Christie Hodgen, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Brooks Rexroat, Kierstyn Lamour, and Kate Hill Cantrill. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Damon Galgut’s novel In a Strange Room. Though this title came out in the U.K. from Atlantic Books last year, it’s only recently been released in the States, published here by EuropaEditions. In September the book was shortlisted for […]


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United States Artists: Propelling America's Creative Potential

by Joshua Bodwell

United States Artists, the five-year-old philanthropic organization known for the fifty $50,000 fellowships it awards each year to “America’s finest artists,” has gotten into the Kickstarter business. Propelled by their mission to “invest in America’s finest artists and illuminate the value of artists to society,” United States Artists has started a Projects portion of their website, designed to help several of their fellows launch projects. The new initiative caught my eye when Wesley McNair, a Maine-based poet whose work I greatly admire, announced “Letters Between Poets.” McNair himself was a USA Ford Fellow in 2006, and is much-revered for penning […]


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The next generation

by Lee Thomas

The San Francisco WritersCorps program places professional writers in community settings to teach creative writing to youth. Like the 826 programs around the U.S., Red Beard Press in Ann Arbor, or Voices Behind Walls in El Paso, TX and Las Cruces, NM, WritersCorps works with young people to hone their writing skills – poetry, fiction, memoir, song writing – as a means of creative power and self-expression. This year, WritersCorps won a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award for their work with young people. From their website: WritersCorps, a project of the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San […]


Reviews |

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, Second Edition, by Betsy Lerner

by Stephanie Vanderslice

After its publication in 2000, the first edition of Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers became one of my students’ favorite writing books, and over time it became my go-to gift to graduating seniors with whom I’d formed a special bond, and whose persistence I hoped to bolster in those daunting years ahead. I even kept a small stash of copies in my office. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to this second edition, published in October 2010.


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Thursday morning candy: Smokelong Quarterly

by Lee Thomas

Here’s where my November resolution to read War and Peace over the last two weeks of December begins to look like so much bluster and brim. I’ve never been a huge fan of New Year’s Resolutions for this very reason: the likelihood of failure feels like the hulking beast perched atop the crumbling overhang of the dainty little ledge where I contemplate things like “finish two stories a month.” BUT, have I got an easy resolution for you: in 2011, read more flash fiction. What’s not to love? You can finish reading it before your coffee gets cold, you can […]


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New Skiff, likely to include the ads

by Lee Thomas

We’ve all known it’s coming, but it seems it is now just a matter of time before ads start showing up in e-readers of all stripes. The Hearst corporation’s “Skiff,” an e-reader they plan to debut at the Consumer Electronics Show (Jan 7 – 10, 2011). Website eReader Chat is skeptical about the viability of the Skiff taking off in an already crowded e-reader marketplace, but notes: Just about the only thing about the Skiff that really strikes me as intriguing is the partnership they’ve inked with Nielsen and comScore to handle advertising analytics for the device. Presumably, they’ll be […]




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