Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Lee Thomas’

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Let's get digital

by Lee Thomas

This post stems from a conversation with my brother – who recently moved to Chile – about what he’d loaded onto his Kindle. As a recent college grad, with limited disposable income, he was pretty stringent in choosing the books he bought. But he’s a voracious reader. His solution: he loaded up his e-reader with a clutch of classics that have entered the public domain. Let them read (old) books! Though beautiful books draw my eye, the trump card for me will always be the words on the page. I love books for the story, which means I keep reading […]


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Thursday morning candy: Wigleaf

by Lee Thomas

There’s something to be said for simplicity. An afternoon spent at the park. Only what you can fit in your pocket. A bowl of fresh apricots straight from the tree (sorry, New York has me dreaming of summer already). Every time I visit Wigleaf, their clean design aesthetic, wide margins and punchy, brief stories of under 1,000 words feel like a cool drink of water on a hot day (even when I am looking at several inches of snow outside the window). Wigleaf started in 2008, and we have Scott Garson to thank for the design and main editing on […]


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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 AROHO writes: AROHO’s Orlando Prizes for unpublished poetry, short fiction, flash fiction and nonfiction celebrate Virginia Woolf’s title character’s liberation from the restraints of time and gender.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, […]


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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. […]


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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 […]


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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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Copyrights, contracts, and clarity – oh my!

by Lee Thomas

Ever wonder how to read a contract? What an agent can do for your manuscript? How to protect the copyright or trademark of your work? These aren’t necessarily things you learn in a fiction workshop. If you live in the Boston area, Grub Street has an evening seminar designed to answer just these sorts of questions. Here’s the skinny: SEMINAR: Monday, January 10th, 6:30-9:30pm, Everything a Writer Needs to Know about the Law This course will provide writers at all stages in their career with a basic understanding of what they need to know about the law. Attorneys Jenny Milana […]


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Beautiful Bindings

by Lee Thomas

As usual, my holiday shopping consisted of lots of hours lost in bookstores, just browsing around, and finding at least as many books that I wanted, as I did books for friends and family. Yep, I’m a bit of a one-trick pony on the gift front – the equivalent of an aunt who always gives hankies. Usually I’m on the hunt for specific things, so my head isn’t all that turned by covers, but this year I couldn’t help but notice the attention to aesthetics that many of the houses are putting into their bindings. Here are some favorites. Europa […]


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Thursday morning candy: Narrative

by Lee Thomas

Family driving you to bunker down in the spare room with your laptop? Never fear! Narrative magazine’s Winter 2011 Issue is up. You can read a six word story by Sherman Alexie that will probably make you feel like your own family isn’t so nuts. You can read three prize-winning tales from Narrative‘s Spring Contest. Fiction, cartoons, poetry, nonfiction – a rich collage of storytelling, right there for the enjoying. I’ll stop rattling on, and let you get to it. Maybe the stories you read will provide some fodder for dinner-table discussion? You never know.




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