Search Results for: personal essay

Sycamore Review

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Sycamore Review is Purdue University’s internationally acclaimed literary journal, affiliated with Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts and the Department of English. Sycamore Review is looking for original poetry, fiction, non-fiction and art. POETRY manuscripts should be typed single-spaced, one poem to a page, up to five poems. FICTION & NONFICTION should be typed double-spaced, with numbered pages and the author’s name and title of the work easily visible on each page. There is not have a specific word count limit, suggest less than 6,000 words. NONFICTION should be literary memoir or creative personal essay, interested in originality, brevity, significance, strong dialogue, and vivid detail. There is no maximum page count, the longer the piece is, the more compelling each page must be. ART Sycamore Review is currently seeking artists for both the magazine’s cover and features artwork inside the issue. Interested artists should follow the instructions under the Art category on Submittable. You may attach 10-15 images or simply…

Why not just get busy and write?

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I’ve been reading back issues of Tiny Lights and found this gem by Suzanne Byerley, published December 2000. Even though this was written twenty years ago, it’s a perfect piece to share with you in these days of restlessness, as we wade through difficult times to find inspiration and energy to write.—Marlene Cullen “Steps” by Suzanne Byerley. I find myself restless. I prowl about the house in my slippers making sure the cats are behaving themselves, sorely tempted to turn on CNN and see if Florida has picked the next president yet. Maybe I’ll lay out a game of solitaire or fumble through that little Bach prelude my daughter mastered when she was six. What is this wild drive to diversion? Why not just sit down and get at what makes me happy? Why not just get busy and write? Because the steps to the desk are like slogging bootless…

Choices

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Guest Blogger Nancy Julien Kopp wrote about choosing a path and exploring your choice. It seems like a perfect writing prompt for the start of a new year. Nancy wrote on her blog: Life is full of choices. I think often of Robert Frost’s poem that tells us of two roads diverging in a yellow wood, and the poet said he took the one less traveled by. But don’t we always wonder if this choice would be better than that choice or another one?   For a writing exercise today, look at the four photos. Each of them is somewhere you can walk. Two have water while the others are filled with green trees. What is your choice? Where would you prefer to walk? A, B, C or D?  Choose one and write a paragraph or several paragraphs about the photo you liked best. Study the photo and ask yourself a…

Under the Gum Tree

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Sonoma County author Nicole Zimmerman’s “The Nature of Beginnings” was recently published in Under the Gum Tree. This Sacramento-based, reader supported, quarterly literary arts magazine publishes creative nonfiction and visual art in the form of a micro-magazine. Under the Gum Tree What does it mean to “tell stories without shame”? “Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.” —Brené Brown Under the Gum Tree has been championing the mantra of telling stories without shame since 2011. We see our mission as sharing stories that remind readers of our shared humanity. Too much of the human experience gets hidden behind constructed facades based on what we perceive the world expects from us. Stop hiding. Live a story. Tell it without shame. If you write true stories, also called creative nonfiction, (and literary nonfiction, by some) and you’re taking storytelling to a level beyond “I was twelve years…

Next Avenue Online Journal

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Next Avenue is a nonprofit journalism website. Next Avenue is extending an invitation to share your story (for those over the age of 50). We are seeking original essays with an insightful perspective on aging. Every day on Next Avenue, we tell the stories of what makes us different and where we share commonalities. It is our hope that readers will glimpse themselves in someone else’s story; find a nugget of information they need; or discover a fresh perspective on an issue relative to aging. We’re looking for insightful essays that illuminate a truth or teach us something new. As the pandemic persists, and life continues to swirl around all of us in unexpected ways, perspective has taken center stage. You may have discovered there has been more space for quiet, like the calm in the center of the storm. Perhaps the quiet is not always welcome, but it is…

Guest Blogger Nancy Julien Kopp and The Writing Fairies

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Guest Blogger Nancy Julien Kopp writes about her struggles and success with Good Fairy/Bad Fairy. 2012 I’ve had a story swirling in the recesses of my mind for several weeks. One that I think would work for a Chicken Soup for the Soul book. Last night, I opened a blank page in Word and began to write the story. I wrote for well over an hour. The story seemed to be coming together nicely. I was aiming for 1200 words, and by the time I was ready to call it quits for the day, I had over 700 words and still a lot to be told. I didn’t take time to read over what I’d written, knew there would be time to do that in the morning. I got ready for bed, feeling satisfied that more than half the first draft was complete. I settled down in bed to watch the…

Fiction. Nonfiction. Creative nonfiction.

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What are you writing these days? Some people find it difficult to concentrate. Others are filling pages with poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and creative nonfiction. It might be a perfect time to chronicle what is going on in your life . . . if you write this as a journalist would . . . just the facts, that’s nonfiction. If you add vignettes and personalize your story, that’s creative nonfiction. Here’s what guest blogger Nancy Julien Kopp says about fiction, creative nonfiction, and fictional narrative. Most people are aware of the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is made up, nonfiction is true. There is, however, a differentiation between nonfiction and creative nonfiction. Nonfiction is generally expository in that it describes, explains or is informative. If you wrote about leaves in a forest in Montana, your readers would probably learn a great deal about the topic. You would write it as…

Listen To Your Heart

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Today’s guest blogger, Nancy Julien Kopp, has been published in Chicken Soup for the Soul books 22 times! Her story: A good many years ago, I submitted to a Chicken Soup for the Soul  book for the first time. The story was a simple one, a childhood memory, that I thought might work for the Fathers and Daughters book. Maybe. I hesitated to send it. Why? My pride told me it was impossible because rejection hurts a lot. Experience added that I hadn’t been writing very long, and the Chicken Soup editors received hundreds, maybe even a thousand or more, submissions for each book. My chances were pretty slim.  Reason stepped in and sneered at me as it said it was pointless to submit this story. What would it matter to the rest of the world? Then they laughed and I whimpered. All three had ganged up on me, and then a funny thing happened. My heart…

Start Small

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Today’s brilliant post is by Nancy Julien Kopp: I’m a proponent of starting with small projects and moving on, step by step, to the bigger ones. Many writers dream of publishing a novel or a full book memoir. Some will start out their writing journey by beginning the pursuit of that dream immediately. It’s fine to have a worthy goal, but diving in the deep end before you know how to swim can bring big problems. Start small. Write a personal essay or memoir about an occurrence, something that happened and had some meaning for you. Later, it might become a part of the book you hope to write. Those little snippets of memoir can grow into something much larger, as can your personal experiences that taught you a lesson, as we see in personal essays. Novelists can practice their skill by writing short stories before attempting a full novel….

Submit. Yay or nay?

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Excerpt from “Submission Control” article about submitting your writing to publications, in the March/April 2019 issue of Writers Digest magazine, by Dinty W. Moore. Sending your work to literary magazines puts you at the whim of editors—but there’s more in your power than you may realize. Every few months, ask yourself why you’re doing this [writing]. If writing, waiting, and facing rejection make you truly miserable, maybe you should stop. But if you don’t want to stop, if writing is necessary, like breathing, then change your way of thinking. The long wait, the long odds, the sometimes inscrutable aesthetic taste of the editorial staff: You have to put all of that aside and write new poems, essays and stories. And that’s a good thing. Because the more you write, the better you get. Dinty W. Moore is the author of the memoir Between Panic & Desire, the writing guide Crafting…