Of course I was happy to be home. Of course I missed my family and was immensely glad to see them. Of course I didn’t miss that ugly, tiny, springy, single dorm mattress and that sweltering dorm room. Of course it was good to sleep in my own bed on the second night home,Continue reading “The Post Writer’s Camp Blah Blah Blahs: How to Deal”
Category Archives: Literature
Dispatches From Writer’s Camp: A Wally By Any Other Name
I’ve never understood how graduates from the MFA in Creative Writing program at Warren Wilson College came to refer to themselves as Wallies. It turns out to be an ancient practice, going back all the way to the year the program moved to Warren Wilson from Goddard College in 1981. I’ve done a little researchContinue reading “Dispatches From Writer’s Camp: A Wally By Any Other Name”
Dispatches From Writer’s Camp: A Room Of One’s Own With A View
I offer up a rumination about rooms, on this 5th day of Writer’s Camp for Wallies. In the best of all possible worlds, if one is a writer, one needs a room of one’s own, but it would also be fine if it provided a view, a good view, of something either internally interesting or externally,Continue reading “Dispatches From Writer’s Camp: A Room Of One’s Own With A View”
Dispatches From Writer’s Camp: Organized Chaos
Well, to begin with, a Wally boy who shall go nameless (after doing an absolute killer reading from his new novel) came down to the porch at about 10 o’clock last night wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, and for the rest of the conference, I predict we will be asking him over andContinue reading “Dispatches From Writer’s Camp: Organized Chaos”
#126: On Meeting Colin Meloy at the Beach
My friend and I walk down Laneda Avenue in Manzanita when his wife, also a friend of mine, calls the cell phone and says that Colin Meloy is inside the Cloud and Leaf signing books, and, like a teenager, I start running down the street. Having been earlier inside the bookstore, having thought about purchasingContinue reading “#126: On Meeting Colin Meloy at the Beach”
#123: On Shakespeare’s Birthday
Harold Bloom said that Shakespeare invented the human. Bloom’s a blowhard pretty much but I think in this case he might be right. What writer in English before Shakespeare anticipated Freud and Jung, fleshed out all the archetypes, captured the various loves and hates and the myriad mental states and the thousand natural shocks that flesh isContinue reading “#123: On Shakespeare’s Birthday”
#110: Shameless Self-Promotion (An Advertisement Poem)
The NaPoWriMo website today suggests that we try an advertisement poem. That’s an actual thing, apparently. As an example, the NaPoWriMo curator provides Exhibit A: Said Farmer Brown Who’s bald on top “Wish I could Rotate the crop” Burma-Shave So rather than create a poem advertising Burma Shave or a made-up product or some thingContinue reading “#110: Shameless Self-Promotion (An Advertisement Poem)”
#108: The Love Song of Bernard Von Scuttlesby
The prompt today from NaPoWriMo is an assignment that I have already done when I mistakenly ripped off the structure and form of a John Berryman poem as my “golden shovel.” I redeemed myself that day by creating a bonus poem based on the William Carlos Williams gem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” I wish I would haveContinue reading “#108: The Love Song of Bernard Von Scuttlesby”
#99: It Sucks When There’s No Resolution
Sometimes I argue with my poems. Sometimes, I write things I don’t believe, just to try them on. I just published a poem that claimed that good fiction sometimes has no resolution–and in that way–good fiction mirrors this same aspect of living–that often, more often than we’d like, issues, problems, and conflicts go unresolved. Certainly,Continue reading “#99: It Sucks When There’s No Resolution”
#98: Sometimes the Resolution is No Resolution
In fiction writing, or in reading fiction, it’s important to understand that sometimes the resolution is that there’s no resolution: there’s no way it can be solved or fixed or for all parties to see eye to eye about a situation they’ve disputed. And the reason it’s that way in fiction writing and in reading fiction,Continue reading “#98: Sometimes the Resolution is No Resolution”
michael jarmer 