Storystorm
Storystorm
The Art of Ignoring
16 November 2018 on Fiction, Storystorm16A writer’s voice is their holy grail: key to their success and an absolute nightmare to find. What a strange conundrum, that finding your voice is hard. It should be...
Storystorm
Writing from Autumn: Contrast and Transformation Or, Yellow Leaf, Blue Sky
02 November 2018 on StorystormWhile running the Sweet Trail through Longmarsh, I watched a yellow leaf tumble from sky to still, blue pond. I stopped, let myself linger there, with fingers balled for warmth...
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Small & Large
26 October 2018 on Blog, Nonfiction, StorystormI like Small. Always have. Not because of my height, which is average. Not because of my scope, which, I like to think, is Large. But because Small, in terms...
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Why We Love Our Favorite Short Stories
05 October 2018 on Blog, Fiction, StorystormI’ll never forget the first time I read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. My tenth-grade English teacher passed around a Tupperware container filled with folded squares of loose leaf—one piece...
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Writing by Hand
28 September 2018 on Blog, StorystormThere’s something so formal about Word document screens, with their clean, white pages and perfectly straight blinking cursors. They make me feel what I’m about to write must also be...
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AWP 2018: What I Brought Home was the Swag
04 May 2018 on Blog, StorystormI don’t mean to sound shallow. There was much that thrilled me at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2018 conference in Tampa beyond the buttons, pens, and...
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AWP 2018: Among My Own – For a Few Days, Anyway
27 April 2018 on Blog, StorystormThe flight left Boston on the billowing forefront of a Nor'easter that would shut down the Eastern Seaboard the following week. We touched down in Tampa’s breezy 65 degrees. It...
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AWP 2018: Consider the coffee
30 March 2018 on Blog, StorystormEvery year, just in time for the zombie-like resurgence of winter in New England to bury all transportation in snow, twelve thousand writers spill into a cavernous convention center to...
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Magnetic Irony
23 February 2018 on Blog, Poetry, StorystormFuture generations may define our period style by its pervasive sincerity. Irony is what's missing from much contemporary poetry. For example, the popular political poems are earnest, if angry, and...
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What do we look for in fiction submissions?
09 February 2018 on Fiction, StorystormBarnstorm’s fiction readers have varied reading tastes and interests, but they share a common passion for stories. Recently, they weighed in on what they look for as they read fiction...
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The Landscape of Memory, or, My Characters Keep Getting Lost in The Desert
01 December 2017 on Blog, Fiction, Storystorm“[E]very pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.” -Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge I close my eyes...
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12 Ways to Write Unique Description
17 November 2017 on Blog, StorystormWe’ve all heard the adages. “Kill the cliché.” “Make it new.” “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” But how does one do this? There are several...
