# data[].attributes.headline
Monthly poetry comps open - updated every month

# data[].attributes.subject
Monthly poetry comps open - updated every month

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You may only have heard of one or two of the larger poetry publishers in the UK, but there are actually a great many excellent small presses that producing everything from full-length collections down to short runs of beautiful hand-made chapbooks. You can find a selection of them listed below. If you're looking to publish a book of poetry, it's worth invesitaging them all to find the publisher that's right for you.

If you want to suggest an addition or correction for this list, you can do so using the Big List Update Form.

Against the Grain

[ Against The Grain Website ]

An innovative, small, independent poetry publisher dedicated to publishing challenging, well-crafted poetry. They aim to produce beautiful works of art, with high production values and edgy appeal. They want their poets to be seen and heard, and they print starkly designed high-quality pamphlets and run launch events and signings to facilitate this.

Arachne Press

[ Arachne Press Website ]

This small press publishes a range of forms. Writers are encouraged to send along a short piece of work for inclusion in one of their anthologies, after which they may be invited to submit a full manuscript.

Arc Publications

[ Arc Publications Website ]

Publishes contemporary poetry from the UK and abroad, including translations. This publisher also has a music imprint. Based in Lancashire.

Artel Press

The Artel Press are a small, independent publisher and book designer founded in 2013 and based in Liverpool, UK. They specialise in short-run art, poetry and biographical titles.

Bad Betty Press

[ Bad Betty Press Website ]

An independent publishing house, based in London. They print poetry by emerging authors, and love writing that is "beautiful and bad (in the Foxy Brown sense)". In their first year they published a series of pamphlets and an anthology on the subject of mental health.

Bloodaxe Books

[ Bloodaxe Books Website ]

Founded by Neil Astley in 1978, this is one of the UK's most well-known poetry publishers. They have an extensive list of British and American poets, and titles published by Bloodaxe Books can be found in many bookstores.

Broken Sleep Books

[ Broken Sleep Books Website ]

Broken Sleep Books is a small, innovative press, which publishes a range of pamphlets and collections, from a range of writers. They particularly wish to encourage working-class writers, LGBTQ+, and BAME writers to submit. Politically they are left-leaning, and have no interest in misogynists, racist, sexists, or the alt-right.

Burning Eye Books

[ Burning Eye Books Website ]

Burning Eye Books is small independent publisher in the South West predominately specialising in promoting spoken word artists. They aim to dispel the assumption that performance poetry does not transfer well to page, as well as give emerging and established artist opportunities to be published. They look for the bold, the fearless and the strange, and pride themselves on providing a conscious portfolio of brilliant poets and writers.

Calder Valley Poetry

[ Calder Valley Poetry Website ]

Calder Valley Poetry is a small press which commenced publication in January 2016 with John Foggin's collection Outlaws and Fallen Angels. It is intended to produce pamphlets by the many fine poets living alongside what was once referred to as Yorkshire's "river of industry".

Carcanet Press

[ Carcanet Press Website ]

A larger publisher which is home to several different poetry imprints. Publishes a diverse list of modern and classic poetry in English and in translation.

Egg Box Publishing

[ Egg Box Publishing Website ]

A small poetry publisher based in Norfolk. Produces the annual anthology of work by students on the University of East Anglia Creative Writing MA, along with a number of other titles.

Emma Press

The Emma Press is an award-winning independent publisher specialising in poetry, short fiction and children's books. It was founded by Emma Dai'an Wright in Winnersh, Berkshire, in 2012 and is now based in Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, UK.

Enitharmon Press

[ Enitharmon Press Website ]

An independent literary press that specialises in publishing poetry from both emerging and established writers. They also publish literary criticism, memoir and translations.

Erbacce Press

[ Erbacce Press Website ]

Liverpool-based Erbacce Press have been publishing poetry chapbooks for nearly 20 years. They are dedicated to ensuring that a writer is paid for their work and not charged for it to be read. They also hold a free annual poetry competition between January 1st and May Day.

Eye Flash Poetry

[ Eye Flash Poetry Website ]

Alongside Eye Flash literary magazine, this small press publishes "pocket poetry pamphlets". These are collections of twelve poems that explore a specific theme, and which are sold online and through various independent bookshops.

Face Press

A poetry press based in the UK. They have published the works of leading British poets like Tom Raworth, Denise Riley, and JH Prynne, as well as the works of new poets like Imogen Cassels and Stuart Hall.

Fly on the Wall Poetry

[ Fly on the Wall Poetry Website ]

The 'publisher with a conscience', Fly on the Wall Press is run by Isabelle Kenyon and publishes an average of 12 books per year, with magazines and charity anthologies as ongoing social-engaged projects.

Happenstance Press

[ Happenstance Press Website ]

This publishes specialises in poetry pamphlets and first collections of UK poets. Run by Helena Nelson, the press is Scotland-based and will usually publish a couple of Scottish or Scotland-based writers each year. Also provides helpful general resources on chapbook publishing.

Hedgespoken Press

[ Hedgespoken Press Website ]

Based in Devon, this small poetry press is interested in publishing artbooks and chapbooks of prose, poetry and artwork at the intersection of myth, story, magic, and connection with the natural world & imaginal world.

Hercules Editions

[ Hercules Editions Website ]

An independent press combining poetry and prose with art and archival material, to create beautiful small books and prints. They're based near the site of artist-poet William Blake's last home and printing works in Hercules Road, Lambeth, which inspired their name.

Indigo Dreams

[ Indigo Dreams Website ]

Indigo Dreams is based in Devon in the beautiful southwest of England, surrounded by Cookworthy Forest and about half an hour from the North Cornwall coast and Dartmoor. They publish around 50 poetry books a year, pamphlets and full collections, as well as three poetry magazines: Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader and Sarasvati.

IRON Press

As publishers become more corporate, global and boring, IRON Press champions new quality writing as it has done since 1973. IRON runs events and launches; it also thinks literature is both serious and fun.

Lapwing Poetry

[ Lapwing Poetry Website ]

A small poetry press based in Belfast. Has been publishing both local and international poets for twenty years.

Neon Books

A small chapbook press which publishes one or two new titles each year, along with a range of pamphlets, broadsides and other ephemera. They also maintain this list!

Onslaught Press

[ Onslaught Press Website ]

The Onslaught Press is a small, independent publishing house based in east Oxford. They put out about ten books a year. After initially intending to focus on academic monographs and picture books they have come to specialise in poetry and haiku.

Papillote Press

[ Papillote Press Website ]

Papillote Press is a publishing house specialising in books about Dominica and the wider Caribbean. They publish a range of books, both fiction and non-fiction, and hope that these books reflect the culture and literary heritage of these islands and make them known to a wider audience.

Peepal Tree Press

[ Peepal Tree Press Website ]

Peepal Tree is a wholly independent company, founded in 1985, and now publishing around 20 books a year. They have published over 300 titles, and are committed to keeping most of them in print. Their list features new writers and established voices.

Penteract Press

[ Penteract Press Website ]

Penteract Press is a publisher of experimental poetry books and chapbooks. Their focus is on exploring the structural properties of poetry. To this end, they aim to promote innovative constrained and visual poetry, as well as works that explore new uses of traditional verse forms.

Platypus Press

[ Platypus Press Website ]

A boutique publisher based in England, which seeks to unearth innovative contemporary poetry and prose, as well as other - more elaborate - literary works.

Red Squirrel Press

[ Red Squirrel Press Website ]

Red Squirrel Press is a self-funded independent press based in Scotland. It was founded in April 2006 by Sheila Wakefield and has published over 190 titles to date. It publishes poetry pamphlets and full collections. Red Squirrel Press showcases young poets such as Claire Askew and Andrew McMillan as well as more established names like James Kirkup, William Bedford, Pippa Little and James McGonigal

Salt

[ Salt Website ]

This well-established publisher produces over 80 books each year, with a focus on poetry and criticism. Publishes both international and English authors.

Seren

[ Seren Website ]

Although mainly a fiction and non-fiction publisher, this press produces several poetry books each year. Its focus is on English writing from or about Wales.

Shearsman

[Shearsman Website ]

An active published or English and American poets. Originally founded as a magazine, Shearsman developed into a poetry press, and now produce around 50 books each year.

Sidekick Books

[ Sidekick Books Website ]

This tiny independent publisher puts together themed, collaborative anthologies, which are an ever-evolving platform for a plethora of styles and approaches. Submission calls are open to anyone and everyone across the world, and they particularly welcome submissions from BAME, LGBTQIA+ and disabled writers.

Smith/Doorstop

[ Smith/Doorstop Website ]

This imprint is owned by The Poetry Business. It publishes books, pamphlets, audio and ebooks. The Poetry Business also runs a number of workshops and edits the literary magazine The North.

Stairwell Books

[ Stairwell Books Website ]

Stairwell Books specialises in good writing from new writers. Though they focus on poets and writers in and around Yorkshire, they will not turn down a brilliant manuscript that deserves to be published. They have an extensive poetry and prose list as well as novels, memoirs, and biographies. Stairwell Books also publishes a literary magazine.

Templar Poetry

[ Templar Poetry Website ]

Produce a number of pamphlets every year, as well as being responsible for the publication of Iota poetry magazine.

The Black Light Engine Room

[ The Black Light Engine Room Website ]

This Middlesbrough-based press and live event series has been running since 2010. As well as publishing a literary magazine, they produce chapbooks that are high-quality both in content and appearance. Many chapbooks feature more than one poet.

The Tall-Lighthouse

[ The Tall-Lighthouse Website ]

An independent poetry business publishing full collections, pamphlets, chapbooks and anthologies of poetry. Known for publishing exciting new poets.

Valley Press

[ Valley Press Website ]

Established in 2008, Valley Press is a thriving independent publishing house based in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, UK. Representing local authors from York and Leeds, and not-so-local writers from London, Brighton, the US, Bermuda and China, they are bringing the world to Yorkshire and Yorkshire to the world.

Verve Poetry

A new Birmingham-based publisher dedicated to promoting and showcasing Birmingham and Midlands poetic talent in colourful and exciting ways. Aims to be not just a publisher of poetry but also an agent for poetic development in the area. Organises workshops, masterclasses, and performance and writing opportunities for younger writers.

Waterloo Press

[ Waterloo Press Website ]

Waterloo Press is a not-for-profit organisation run by an editorial and design collective. It has a long history, and has published more than 100 titles during its lifespan.

[ Back to Top ]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You may only have heard of one or two of the larger poetry publishers in the UK, but there are actually a great many excellent small presses that producing everything from full-length collections d...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When it comes to getting your work noticed, there’s little better than winning or being shortlisted for a writing competition… and the odds of that happening aren’t as long as you…

# data[].attributes.headline
Composition - literary elements worksheet

# data[].attributes.subject
Composition - literary elements worksheet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Poetry Prompts Generator

Unleash Your Creativity with the Poetry Prompts Generator

Creativity knows no bounds, and poetry is the quintessential form of expressing emotions, thoughts, and experiences through beautiful verses.

However, even the most seasoned poets can sometimes find themselves grappling with writer's block or struggling to find inspiration.

If you're seeking to fuel your poetic musings or simply embark on a creative journey, the Poetry Prompts Generator is your gateway to a world of imagination and literary exploration.

Features of the Poetry Prompts Generator

1. Vast Collection of Prompts

The Poetry Prompts Generator boasts a diverse and extensive collection of over 150 poetic prompts across various categories.

From emotions and nature to history and fantasy, these prompts cover a wide spectrum of themes, ensuring there's something for everyone.

2. Random Prompt Generator

The generator employs a smart randomization algorithm that selects a prompt from the array, making each experience unique and unpredictable.

With just a click, you'll receive a fresh prompt that'll set your poetic spirit soaring.

3. User-Friendly Interface The interface is designed to be intuitive and easy to use.

You don't need to be a tech expert to dive into the world of poetry prompts.

Just visit the website, and you're ready to begin your poetic journey.

4. Copy to Clipboard

Once you find the perfect prompt that resonates with your soul, the Poetry Prompts Generator allows you to copy the prompt to your clipboard with a simple click. No more worrying about losing that spark of inspiration.

5. Responsive Design

Whether you're using a desktop, tablet, or smartphone, the generator's responsive design ensures a seamless experience across all devices.

Write poetry on-the-go and never miss a moment of creative inspiration.

Benefits of the Poetry Prompts Generator

1. Overcoming Writer's Block

Every poet encounters moments of writer's block, where ideas seem elusive.

The Poetry Prompts Generator acts as a catalyst, sparking new ideas and breaking down the barriers that inhibit your creativity.

2. Exploration of Different Themes

The wide array of prompt categories encourages poets to explore themes they might not have considered before. This exploration expands your poetic horizons and enriches your writing.

3. Inspiration for New Poems

Even seasoned poets sometimes struggle to find fresh ideas.

The generator breathes new life into your poetic creations, providing a wellspring of inspiration for countless new poems.

4. Cultivating Writing Discipline Regularly using the Poetry Prompts Generator can help establish a writing routine, allowing you to hone your craft and grow as a poet.

5. Creative Warm-up

Whether you're preparing to write a full-length poem or just want to warm up your creative muscles, the Poetry Prompts Generator provides an ideal starting point.

How to Use the Poetry Prompts Generator

Using the Poetry Prompts Generator is a breeze:

1. Visit the Website

Simply navigate to the website hosting the Poetry Prompts Generator.

2. Generate a Prompt

Click the "Generate New Prompt" button to receive a randomly selected prompt from the extensive array.

3. Explore and Create

Read the prompt carefully and let your imagination run wild. Craft your verses, bringing to life the emotions and imagery inspired by the prompt.

4. Copy and Save

If a particular prompt strikes a chord, click the "Copy" button to save it to your clipboard for easy access and reference.

5. Repeat as Needed

Feel free to generate multiple prompts or come back whenever you need a fresh dose of inspiration.

The Poetry Prompts Generator is a powerful tool that empowers poets to embark on exciting creative adventures.

Whether you're an experienced poet or just beginning to explore the world of poetry, this generator will ignite your passion for words and unlock the beauty of your thoughts.

Don't let writer's block hold you back.

Embrace the Poetry Prompts Generator and embrace the limitless possibilities of poetry.

Let your verses flow and create a world of enchanting beauty with every line you write.

*Embrace the Poetry Prompts Generator and let your creativity soar to new heights.*

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Poetry Prompts Generator Creativity knows no bounds, and poetry is the quintessential form of expressing emotions, thoughts, and experiences through beautiful verses. However, even the most seasoned poets can sometimes find themselves grappling with writer's block or struggling to find inspiration.

# data[].attributes.headline
Publishers open to Experimental and Hybrid Forms

# data[].attributes.subject
Publishers open to Experimental and Hybrid Forms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I was like Robert Peary embarking for the North Pole-that is, if we can pretend for a moment that the publishing world is a vast, icy, unreachable landscape and I am much, much braver than I am. No, there weren't endless miles of frigid peril before me-just one tiny button: "submit"-but somehow the two seemed about the same. For years I had told my colleagues, with an air of superiority, that I wasn't interested in publication. The truth was, I was afraid to fail.

And I did (mostly). Like most authors venturing into the wide world of publishing, I was greeted with more rejection than acceptance. Without a guide to help me navigate the landscape, I became anxious and eventually, depressed.

Though unpleasant, this isn't abnormal. Even animals show signs of depression when they fail, and some researchers think this innate response prevented our ancestors from getting hurt when they were defeated in a physical challenge. When we're depressed, we back down. But today, we don't need to back away from failure. As I said, the publishing world is a broad landscape, with endlessly varied aesthetics and groups. Unlike our ancestors who had only one community by which their value was determined, as authors we have many tribes. If one group rejects us, we can find another home.

So our innate response to rejection-anxiety and, potentially, depression-doesn't always serve us well. And, if we are highly sensitive this response is likely to be strong, even overwhelming. Luckily, any instinct can be overridden if we are aware of it. Just like we can learn not to blink when applying eye drops, we can learn to take rejection without giving up our self-worth.

If you are a sensitive author who struggles with rejection-I am!-the good news is that your trait of sensitivity, which can make rejection extra difficult, also affords you abilities that can help you navigate and learn from rejection more skillfully than most. And once you cultivate those talents, rejection might actually help you succeed.

But, if you are experiencing depression and anxiety in the meantime, please be kind to yourself! Give yourself whatever you need. The suggestions that follow are simply my own, hand-drawn map, intended to help other travelers get started on their way. I'm neither a cartographer nor a psychologist, just a fellow sensitive author wishing you success in all your publishing efforts, even the failed ones.

First, cultivate a helpful mindset. If you are a person with high sensitivity, you are capable of perceiving yourself and your experiences with exceptional depth and nuance. Before submitting, consider the environment you are entering when you send out your writing for publication.

When I worked as a poetry editor for a literary magazine, I sometimes had over 1,000 poems on my desk at a time. Though I tried my best to become a perfectly fair editorial machine, I quickly realized that I am a human. Some days I was more patient and generous, some days less. Some days I liked many poems, some days few. In other words, I realized that publication is by nature subjective.

Because publication is when writing, enacted in the sacred silence of a single human heart, becomes communication. Like all human connections, it's both magical and messy. And it never, ever goes as planned. If you are sensitive, this perceived failure might affect you deeply. But, if you are deeply affected, you might learn to communicate-to write-very skillfully, because you feel that you must.

Next, set boundaries. If you are highly sensitive, you perceive stimulation-physical and emotional-more intensely than most. You often experience life acutely, and as a result you can become overwhelmed easily. Luckily, you also have the ability to sense precisely when this balance shifts.

All authors receive rejection, and rejection comes with an emotional response. If you are sensitive, it might be helpful to have control over when you experience this response. Say you are overwhelmed one day, with either positive or negative stimulation. At that moment, it's unlikely you'll be able to experience rejection as helpful. It would be nicer to receive a rejection (or acceptance!) when you're fresh, calm, and capable of processing it effectively.

To give yourself this advantage, you might want to create an email account just for submissions. Check the email only you are at your best. Then, you can receive feedback on your own terms, whenever it works for you.

Lastly, be a (temporary) scientist. When I receive a rejection, I ask myself some questions:

1. Did the editor understand what I'm trying to achieve with this piece? It's only possible to get a sense of the editor's reasoning if they provide feedback. If they do, it's up to you to determine whether or not their comments demonstrate an understanding of your basic intentions. If not, could you have been clearer?

2. What is the journal's aesthetic and what is mine? This is a good chance to think about the philosophy underlying your work and the aesthetic that arises out of it. Does your aesthetic reflect your basic intention? And what about the journal to which you submitted your work? Does their philosophy and corresponding aesthetic align with yours? A journal is a home for writing, and your home should reflect your taste.

3. Where might my work be a better fit? After considering the aesthetic of the journal that rejected your work, you'll be better equipped to choose a journal that might publish your writing. Which leads me to the most important step-

Submit (again)! If you take time to learn from rejection, each time you submit you'll be more likely to be published. And when you are, you can look behind you and see each rejection like a footprint leading you to success.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Sensitive Author's Guide to Rejection

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I was like Robert Peary embarking for the North Pole-that is, if we can pretend for a moment that the publishing world is a vast, icy, unreachable landscape and I am much, much braver than I am. No, there weren't endless miles of frigid peril before me-just one tiny button: "submit"-but somehow the two seemed about the same.

# data[].attributes.headline
Literary Criticism as a Secular Spiritual Discipline

# data[].attributes.subject
Literary Criticism as a Secular Spiritual Discipline

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.
"When you were a child you believed yourself special, deserving, and every piece of evidence to the contrary broke your heart. As an adult, the same was true." - Elizabeth McCracken, "Mistress Mickle All at Sea"

Literature has always been psychologically linked with religion for me. When I first realized I wanted to "do something with literature" in my life, I was twenty-three and starting to realize I didn't believe in the evangelical Christianity I'd entered early adulthood with. This was happening while I was slogging through a five-month stint on board a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean during my last two years in the Marine Corps.

One of the reasons I'd been hesitant to completely abandon my faith was that I didn't know what could take its place. For no particular reason, I'd taken a copy of Moby Dick on board. It was one of those books I believed people should read at some point, and while on a boat seemed like that point. Somewhere in the middle of one of Ahab's monologues, perhaps the "Quarterdeck" chapter, I realized that literature was probably the best I was going to be able to do as a replacement.

Because of this association, I probably don't read literature the way most people do. I certainly don't read it the way most professors do, with a very theory-forward reading. That's one reason I quit the study of literature after my M.A. instead of continuing on to make literature my full-time profession. I look to literature to help me figure out the answers to big, existential questions. There is nothing theoretical to me about these questions; I'm literally asking stories questions like, Why should anyone not immediately end their existence in a world that seems to make no sense?

I took to literature to help me decide what decisions to make, to craft my own meaning of right and wrong, even if I no longer believe in capital R Right and capital W Wrong. Not only do most literary scholars not seem to think this is the point of reading, but most writers would deny that they even want any such responsibility. Nonetheless, it's the role I've given them.

Of course, the texts of modern short stories and novels aren't made of the same stuff as religious texts. You won't get a "thou shalt" in a Curtis Sittenfeld story, but in the best stories there is wisdom to read, to chew over ("meditate upon," to use the religious discipline term) and to either make a part of you or to wrestle against.

The closest analogy between reading literature and religion, I've found, comes with the act of criticism. Criticism forces me as a reader to develop not just a keen mind, but qualities that could be described as spiritual ones-discernment, humility, graciousness, and grace (the last two being different in important ways despite their status as cognates).

When I say "criticism," I mean "thinking seriously about the meaning of a story on a number of levels and writing about it." There's a difference between the terms literary review, literary criticism, and literary theory, but for me, I don't feel the need to distinguish much between them.

Since I'm not a professional literary practitioner, I'm not writing articles for journals that will be picked over by other professionals, who will then write articles of their own either agreeing with or arguing against me. (A second reason I abandoned literature as a profession after the M.A.: realizing the goal of scholarship seemed to amount to propagating endless discourse, none of which aimed to ever come to a semi-authoritative resolution.) Literary criticism to me is a public act of spiritually interacting with a story.

I write for a blog. I'm not even smart enough, like the editor of this blog is, to figure out how to use Substack. I'm still using Blogspot, which is now so old in the tooth, it's a wonder anyone finds me at all. Some readers do find me, though, and when they do, it's almost always for a piece of criticism I've done. For the past five years, I've blogged on every short story in Best American Short Stories. I've also done a few blog-throughs of Pushcart and the O. Henry anthology. I figure it's a useful niche for someone like me, a guy who's had more literary training than the average Joe but not as much as a professional.
Literary criticism to me is a public act of spiritually interacting with a story.
Professionals tend to write for other professionals, whereas I hope to be more of a bridge between professionals and thoughtful working people who, like me, do something else for a living. ("Bridge builder" is the original meaning of pontifex, a term for a high priest.) Because there is so little serious writing for the public about short stories, I feel like this is something useful I can do. It's my form of "literary citizenship," to use a term I'm not entirely sure should exist. It's very clear from the few comments that show up on the blog that most readers are students dabbling in the waters of short stories looking for a little help understanding what they're reading. That means I get to be a teacher without going to any faculty meetings. Not a bad hobby.

There's a bit of a responsibility that comes with this, though. For a lot of these students, I assume they've read a story in BASS or another anthology, found it difficult, and Googled it. Often, the top results are the story itself, followed by either my blog or Karen Carlson's. They'll probably pick one of us, both if they're really ambitious. (Often, Karen and I refer readers to one another, so some of her readers come from me and some of mine come from her.) That means that I'm one of maybe two voices these readers are ever going to hear about these stories. For the writers involved, it could mean picking up a few extra readers, which is always important in a profession that doesn't pay much.

I have a responsibility to the writers to consider their work seriously. I have a responsibility to readers of my blog to review the works honestly and thoughtfully. I also have a responsibility to myself to review the works with a full and open heart, because the point of reading has always been what the purpose of religion is for some people--to develop into a person who is capable of fulfilling gradually higher purposes in the world.
I have a responsibility to the writers to consider their work seriously...I also have a responsibility to myself to review the works with a full and open heart.
Blocking me from fulfilling these responsibilities are the usual deadly sins, not the least of which is sloth. Looking back a few years to just before I'd undertaken to write more thoughtfully about short stories, I see that I commented on Karen's blog in 2017 about how an Elizabeth McCracken short story somehow didn't do it for me. Since writing more seriously about short stories, however, McCracken has become possibly my favorite contemporary writer. I just re-read the story ("Mistress Mickle All at Sea," the one quoted in the epigraph), and I found it to be equal to any of the other great work she's done. I found it, in fact, to be the equal of almost anything I've ever read. What was I thinking in 2017? Most likely, I was simply reading too casually.

When a writer offers a story, it's an invitation to intimacy. Rushing through it is akin to rushing through sex. Someone is offering you a valuable part of themselves. That doesn't mean you have to like it, but it does mean you shouldn't treat it like it's nothing just because you want to get through blogging all twenty stories in an anthology by the end of the year. That's why I always make myself read every story twice before I write a word about them.

A much greater stumbling block than sloth, though, is envy. I am never more than a two-second trigger away from hating everyone who's accomplished more as a writer than I have. (In keeping with the religious imagery, I think confession can be important for literary minds.) It's not that I've never had any success with my own fiction (really! Look at this good thing that happened to me and this one), but I am a guy who once dreamed on a ship of being Melville and now works a job he'd prefer not to do but can't quit and isn't anywhere near being able to make a living out of writing. (So...kind of like Melville.)

This year, while blogging through BASS, I had to review a story from a writer who'd been in the same edition of the same journal I'd been in. I felt envy. During an aborted blog-through of Pushcart, I was dealing with the fact that I'd been nominated (maybe...the editor said she wasn't sure she'd gotten the nominations in on time, because the journal had moved), but not selected. Again, I felt envy. I felt like the specialness of the stories I was reading made me less special. Maybe better people than me don't feel this way, but it's hard-to maintain the sexual metaphor-to not feel that I've offered intimacy to someone and been rejected in favor of others.

I am not describing here what should be. I'm telling you what is, the real feelings I struggle with. I'm sure actual religious clergy struggle with something similar- "I'm way more humble and faithful than that preacher, why does he get all the congregants?" There are so many ways envy could color my reading. The obvious one is that I'd be too resistant to a story, but it's also hard not to be so afraid that I'm being negative out of envy that I end up being overly positive. (Or worse still, to be so afraid of people thinking I'm envious that I give an overly positive review.)

Envy makes it hard to be sure of myself that I'm being genuine. There's also the concern in my head that a negative critical reading could affect my chances of being published myself one day. Since most readers of short stories are themselves writers, I assume that's one reason there is so little serious criticism available to the general public about short stories. It's too risky for most readers. There's a reason Karen and I are near the top of those Google results.

To say that poems are prayers is now so common as to be somewhat hackneyed. (A poet I know Tweeted an attempt to update this with the pithy but somewhat unconvincing edit that poems aren't prayers, but rather why we pray.) If poets can bend religious imagery toward secular texts in this way, then I think it's not too bold to think of literary criticism as a type of sacrament, a ceremony or ritual one does in order to connect more fully with the divine.

In the Quaker tradition, they do not speak so much of sacraments as of disciplines, such as fasting, meditation, prayer, and quiet. I think of writing criticism in this way. With a discipline, it isn't necessary for us to be in a completely perfect mindset before we start. The point of a discipline is to do it, and in the process, the right mindset will sometimes come. Do the disciplines enough, and eventually you'll be in the right mindset more often. Wrestle with sloth and envy through criticism, and maybe, one day, you'll have just a little bit more control over these things all the time.

And here I arrive at an ending that can only be called evangelical, in the sense that I am spreading the good news about writing thoughtful pieces about literature online. While on the one hand it's nice that my little, aesthetically challenged blog occasionally gets some readers, what this is really a sign of is how anemic the critical community of American literary fiction is. Karen and I should not be the only people blogging through BASS, but we seem to be. And that's BASS, the one short story anthology that probably gets more love and attention than any other. How much less attention do the smaller anthologies get, let alone individual journals? I'm sure every writer out there who's ever been published has dealt with the crashing realization the day after their story comes out that nobody cares.

We often talk about the glut of good writers from all the MFA programs and all the good advice that's available freely now. We talk about how there aren't enough readers for all these writers. We probably can't do much about these things, but we can do something right now to slightly increase the amount of thoughtful readership in proportion to the amount of thoughtful writing. You can do it right now. You can read any journal, find one thing that appeals to you, and keep thinking about it until you have something interesting to say. I'm not talking about some quick Twitter post that says, "Emma Cline's latest is <fire emoji>." I mean write something that costs you some sweat.

Post it somewhere. Tag the writer some place. (If your criticism is harsh, and you're sure it's really what you think, of course, it's fair to post it, but for God's sake, don't tag the writer.) Maybe the writer never sees it, or if they see it, maybe they never respond, but I guarantee you there are thousands of writers out there whose week it would make to have one person respond to their creative act of love with a reciprocal critical act of love. The only apt word to describe this completion of the literary cycle is "consummation."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Literary Criticism as a Secular Spiritual Discipline

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world. "When you were a child you believed yourself special, deserving, and every piece of evidence to the contrary broke your heart. As an adult, the same was true."

# data[].attributes.headline
The Cost - about writing childhood trauma

# data[].attributes.subject
The Cost - about writing childhood trauma

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Jeannine Ouellette
If something bad happens and only you know it, it could be your fault. Like when Pete slinks home whining and Mama gets down on her knees to look underneath him. Mama's nylons have a run. Sometimes she uses clear fingernail polish to fix runs, but it doesn't work for holes. "That's a big bruise he's got here," Mama says to Mafia. Her pretty round bun is falling loose, and strands of hair cover her face. I like to watch Mama in the bathroom when she twists her thick hair up, holding the bobby pins in her mouth so she can use two hands. "Look at this, will you?" Mama says now. "I think this dog got hit." On TV, the person is guessing the price of onion soup. I don't like onions, but I watch anyway. Some kids will blurt things out just because they're scared. But not me. I can keep secrets. Like how on my way home from school I saw Pete run across Albert Street, how the red car screeched, how Pete made that high, sharp sound.
This passage from my memoir, The Part That Burns, took decades to write. I wanted to convey how this little girl-the child I once was-was terrified to tell anyone, especially her parents, about witnessing her beloved dog get hit by a car. But the scene always came out too maudlin, too whiny, until I took an expensive workshop with a well-known literary agent and learned a device called "third-level emotion." Instead of directly expressing the narrator's fear, I had to trace that fear to a secondary emotion, which I identified as defiance, and, finally, to a third-level emotion: pride.
Some kids will blurt things out just because they're scared. But not me. I can keep secrets.
*

I was three or four when my stepfather, Mafia, first sexually molested me. He continued until he abandoned our family-"like a thief in the night," my mother always said-when I was ten.

*

Between 2016 and '17, The Alliance for Children-an advocacy organization in Texas-conducted 1,181 forensic interviews with children, and more than half had delayed reporting sexual abuse. The Alliance says, "Many different sexual abuse dynamics affect why a victim may wait to tell, or never disclose at all."

One of those dynamics, in my experience, is that no one wants to hear it.

*

When I first started querying The Part That Burns as an autobiographical novel, a dream agent replied instantly to request the first hundred pages. When she finished reading, she wrote:
"[T]here's a lot to admire about the prose here: the writing really seethes and shines on the page. Yet I'll admit that I found it hard to read about sexual abuse, especially of such a young character, quite this early in a work."
*

One forensic interviewer from the Alliance for Children says: "I have seen that people find it difficult to believe victims' statements of sexual abuse because so often they have waited months, sometimes years, to report their experiences .... As a professional in the field, this can be frustrating, as delayed disclosures are very common."

I wrote about my own delayed disclosure in The Part That Burns. I was living briefly with my father then. My mother, who had raised me until age eleven, had decided it was his turn. But my father was remarried-with two preschool children of his own-and his wife, just fifteen years older than me, wasn't thrilled about housing a pre-teen girl with social anxiety and a tendency to sneak into the "off-limits to stepchildren" upstairs bathroom for the good shampoo hidden there. Here's the scene in The Part That Burns where I tell a friend about being abused:
Eighth grade is exactly like seventh grade, but worse. The school year is almost over by the time my health teacher, Ms. Nick, shows us that movie about good touch and bad touch. The part about bad touch catches me off guard. I have never thought about things this way, but now, after this movie, I can't stop remembering Mafia. Ms. Nick says we're supposed to tell someone about bad touch. But I'm not sure. The Mafia stuff was a long time ago, all the way back in Wyoming. And Duluth. I was little then. Does it even matter now? I'm pretty sure it doesn't, but for some reason I can't shake it out of my head. I guess that's why I finally tell Kim about the tickling game. "Eww," Kim says. "That's gross." "I know," I say, "but do you think it counts? Like, for what Ms. Nick said after the movie?"
Not long after this moment, the narrator does tell her mom, who tells the narrator's dad. The narrator remains mostly sure the abuse is not a big deal. At thirteen going on fourteen, things that happened at ten and younger seem forever ago.

Maybe that's why the narrator so drastically underestimates the cost of telling.

*

What my mother said, when I told her about Mafia, was not much. My father said nothing at all. No apologies or hugs. No yelling, either. Thank god, no therapy. In fact, I thought the case was closed. What a relief. Only in time did I recognize the gravity of my punishment, which no one named, even as it compounded with time.

The first sign came when my stepmother, in the days after my disclosure, forbade her preschool daughter, my half-sister, from being alone with me. A couple of weeks later, when the school year ended, my father announced I'd be going back to live with my mother. This was confusing since she'd already said she didn't want me. And within a couple of months of my return, my mother kicked me out of her apartment, throwing my algebra book and underwear out the door behind me. My father didn't intervene. Luckily, kind neighbors and teachers did. I spent much of ninth and tenth grades living first with a woman I babysat for, then with my Spanish teacher. I would gladly have remained with either of them until I emancipated. But as my mother's mental health declined further, she started calling the police to report me as a runaway. Once, she even suggested we go for ice cream, but dropped me at The Bridge for Runaway Youth instead-then drove away laughing. By my senior year, I was in foster care. Around this same time, my stepfather, living in a different city, was convicted for felony sexual misconduct for abusing his next stepdaughter. She was older and told faster. Her mother divorced him, and charges were brought immediately.

*

Here is where I feel compelled to say that I was a straight A student. I didn't use drugs. Never got detention. I babysat and worked part time at Arby's. I did eventually start skipping a lot of school as I fell into what I now know-but no one then named-as clinical depression after bouncing through four high schools in as many years during the chaos of my mom's ceaseless moves and violent mental health crises. Halfway through my senior year in foster care, I stopped attending school altogether-but I kept on with my coursework. My teachers, counselors, and principals ensured that I walked the stage and received my diploma at graduation. Neither parent attended. A year later, I got myself into the University of Minnesota on a Pell grant.

I wasn't a perfect kid. But I was good enough.

*

After I disclosed the abuse, I learned the cost of telling. It hurt, but I didn't regret it. I still don't. In fact, as the years passed and the abuse's shadow darkened, I felt increasing urgency to write about it. Ultimately, though, despite writing and publishing prolifically through my twenties and thirties, it took until my forties to learn the skills-third-level emotion being just one-to make this ugly story into something more. To make it "simply beautiful ... precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid," as Joyce Carol Oates wrote when she selected the very first piece I wrote about my childhood for a literary prize in 2015.

I was forty-seven years old then. Thirty-four years had passed since my disclosure in eighth grade. Neither my father nor mother had maintained any closeness with me in adulthood. In fact, I have seen my father twice in the last fifteen years-both times when I was in Florida for other reasons and drove long distances to see him. My mother appears to have disowned me, though I cannot know, since she does not respond to my emails or texts.

So what did it cost me to tell, again?

*

Between that first story in 2015 and my contract for The Part That Burns, some members of my birth family stopped speaking to me completely. Only one member of my original family-my sister Rachael (six years younger and Mafia's biological daughter)-supports my work. Rachael took the brunt of our mom's mental illness when I was living with teachers and neighbors and in foster care. Rachael eventually landed in foster care too, remaining there through middle and high school. My stories, she says, help her untangle painful and confusing memories. For another family member who demands to be "left out of it," I acquiesce. For my mother, who demands the same, I do not. Instead, before my book launch, I emailed her this:
These events were a very long time ago. But ... learning how to write about these traumas was a crucial part of healing from them. We know now that childhood sexual abuse is deeply damaging in a way that is lifelong. The neural pathways it affects are still in development during childhood. But, ultimately, my book ... is about healing and moving on, about forgiveness and resilience and transformation, and that's where my focus is now .... Maybe you can view this book as an artifact of the past, about past versions of ourselves, and be at peace with it. That is something I've seen happen with some other writers who've been through very hard things in childhood. It's also okay if you just ignore the book. I totally understand and support that. I just hope we don't have to have new conflict over things that are over. There is no reason for that to happen. Between Covid and our incredibly unstable national politics ... life has never felt more fragile. So it would mean a lot if we can just have peace.
My mother never replied.

*

When my book came out, I received an unexpected and deeply appreciated outpouring from aunts and uncles and cousins on my mom's side, people who lived on the periphery of my childhood and who were, to my tremendous surprise, proud of me for writing my story. Not only did they believe me-they already knew. One cousin wrote this:
"I had heard there was sexual abuse with Mike (pig) and that [your mom] was beating on you and Rachael. I'm so sorry you had to endure that, and that nobody came to help. I remember asking my mom, 'If you know, why don't you do something?' It seems so easy when you're a kid.'"
*

The Part That Burns doesn't say much about my father. It isn't about him. It's about me as a young mother, coming undone by the incest I thought was behind me but was actually curled up inside. In one dramatic scene, the narrator learns her mother knew about the sexual abuse while it was happening. But no similar scene addresses the narrator's father, and whether he knew.

Maybe that's why I said yes when, six months after my book launch, I received an email from a writer acquaintance who was curating an anthology on father loss, lack, and legacy. The editors at her academic press had requested "one more essay, specifically on surviving incest." The acquaintance thought of me. I didn't want to write about incest again. Writing about incest is grueling. Besides, as noted, most people don't want to hear about it.

But I did want to write about my father. I wanted to capture the love I felt-feel-for him, while honoring the ache of his neglect. Unlike my mother, my father never hit me or terrorized me verbally. What he did, mostly, was nothing. And while absentee fatherhood was common in 1970s divorces, it's not that simple. It has taken decades for me to see my father's role in the harms I suffered-but, once seen, it cannot be unseen. Immediately after I disclosed the sexual abuse, my father, who-notably-had more than adequate middle-class means, sent me back to my mother, who lived far below the poverty line on student loans. Also, my mother's sister's unemployed husband had moved in with her when I moved out.

Again: my father, on hearing that his daughter had been molested for six straight years by her mother's male partner, sent that daughter to live with the mother and her new male partner. And when my mother kicked me out of her house shortly thereafter (for not having folded the laundry), my father did nothing, just as he did when I was placed in foster care.

Ultimately, my father loss and lack essay centered itself within a particular phone call between my father and me back when my children were babies. I was bereft and desperate with eruptions of repressed trauma. My mother had recently told me she'd known about Mafia all along. Now, I wanted to hear what my father knew:
"Mom's not speaking to me," I told my father as fallen leaves swirled in tight cyclones outside the kitchen window. I was steering us away from Mom's uncles and back to the point. "She drove out here to see our new house, visit Sophie, and we got to talking about Wyoming, and Mafia. Then she blew up and hasn't spoken to me since." I paused. "She's never even met Max." I shifted my son from one nipple to the other, tucked a tendril of sweaty blonde hair behind his ear. "He's four months now, by the way." "She's always had that temper," my father said again. "I don't know how you managed." I felt strangely as if my father were speaking to someone else, someone who was not his daughter. I wanted him to connect our conversation to the little girl I'd once been. "I'm just... I guess the reason Mom stormed out is because she admitted, accidentally, I think, that she always knew about Mafia. Something about how she tried back then to make him get counseling for what he was doing to me? I had no idea she knew all along that Mafia was molesting me, years before I told." My heart was beating so hard I felt faint. Max pulled off the nipple and arched his back. I hefted him onto my shoulder. "You know what I mean?" I said to my dad. "Sure," he said. "I know what you mean. I knew she knew. I knew, too. I think everyone knew."
The anthology contract fell through. But the essay was published anyway, in spring of '22, in an online literary journal. The editors said it was beautiful and important. They said they were glad it was in the world.

Was I still afraid of the cost?
If something bad happens and only you know it, that does not make it your fault.
*

On September 28, Hurricane Ian made landfall first on Cayo Costa then south of Punta Gorda, becoming the first Category 4 hurricane to impact Southwest Florida since Charley in 2004. Also the deadliest hurricane to strike Florida since the 1935 Labor Day hurricane.

My father lives 100 miles from Punta Gorda.

*

On the afternoon of October 11, suffering too little sleep and monster deadlines, I munched not one but two Verb bars, each containing more caffeine than an espresso. Soon after, my phone pinged: a message from the journal that had published my father loss and lack essay five months earlier. Something about an email from a person I couldn't place. "Your sister's partner?" they said.

What sister? What partner?

Across the room, my youngest child-Billie, age twenty-seven-clickety-clacked on their laptop. We often co-work at my house, just a mile from where Billie's foster son, a toddler, attends preschool. On October 11, we were still in the throes of integrating this little boy into our family. He was Billie's first placement since becoming licensed during the pandemic. Only a few weeks earlier, Billie had picked him up from his grandmother, who had tried but was not quite able to care for him after he was removed from his mother's home. Billie had driven straight from the grandma's house to my front door, looking almost as stunned as the baby. But as the weeks passed, both were settling, softening, into a tender routine.

Now, Billie looked up from their computer. "What?" they said.

"Nothing," I said. "I just ate two Verb bars. Whoa."

By this time, I was connecting the dots-or seeing through the storm, as it were.

During Hurricane Ian, communication took place between members of my family in Minnesota and Florida. I know because I was told so by a Minnesota family member who demands to be left out of my writing. I do not know exactly what-other than storm stuff-was said, but on October 4, just days later, a 312-word email was sent to the journal by the wealthy partner of my Floridian half-sister. The same half-sister I was forbidden to be alone with after I disclosed the sexual abuse. The same half-sister who, despite our "friendship" on Facebook, does not interact with me. I have not seen her in thirty years.

My half-sister's wealthy partner said he knew "the family that is the subject of Ms. Ouellette's essay, as well as the circumstances surrounding its topic." He said, "[T]o be honest, I found [her book] to be well-written prose." But he had concerns about my essay because it "... uses real names and ... directly accuses the family of a failure to report [maltreatment of a child], which is a third-degree felony in the state of Florida. It's also false."

*

Almost no one goes into writing to make money. Those who do tend to become disillusioned quickly. Most journals are volunteer labors of love with no legal teams to vet things or advise on potential problems. The literary journal that published my "beautiful and important" essay took it offline immediately after reading my half-sister's wealthy partner's email.

*

My half-sister's wealthy partner could not know "the family that is the subject of my essay and the circumstances surrounding its topic" because that family and those circumstances are ghosts from almost a half century ago.

As for my father: I know what he told me on the phone that day. I know how it felt in my body, still feels now. I also understand why my half-sister might feel protective of my father-her father-who has been a good father to her, as far as I know. It must be painful to read about this version of the man she loves. But she wasn't alive when my stepfather was abusing me. She was a preschooler when I told, and when my father wholly abdicated his responsibility for the daughter of his first marriage. Has she ever asked my father about these things? Why he almost never visited me? Why he never attempted to know his beautiful grandchildren? She might find it hurtful to learn that my father understood his other daughter was being abused and didn't act on it, that he knew she was kicked out of her mother's house and didn't act on it, that he knew she was placed in foster care and didn't act on it. However, that something hurts does not make it false.

If only that were so.

*

I said nothing to anyone the day my essay was pulled. Even though I was with one of the people I love most in all the world. Billie and I are so close we sometimes hear each other's thoughts. In fact, they probably did hear my thoughts that day when they looked up and said, "What?" But as the adrenaline swallowed me, I said nothing more except, "Wanna take a walk?" And why not, since Minnesota is such a showoff in October, flames of orange and red engulfing the elms. I don't remember that, though. I remember only my heart, that battered old bird just thrashing, thrashing.

Later, Billie went home.

Later, my husband came home.
Some kids will blurt things out just because they're scared. But not me. I can keep secrets.
*

According to The Alliance for Children, victims may believe they are at fault, that no one will believe them if they tell, or that they are impure and dirty.

*

It would take me weeks to tell the people I love most about the essay being pulled. But on the morning after, I sent an email to the address from which my half-sister's wealthy partner had written, saying, in part:
You made a strong and erroneous statement to my publisher...that I made false claims.... Unfortunately, trauma tears families apart, but even still there exists today a core group of living adults who had exposure to the open conversations around these abuses.... Undoubtedly, it is uncomfortable for most people to imagine that adults could know about child maltreatment and not act, but this is the case for many, many, many children every single day. I wish it were not so, but it is, and the research backs this up thoroughly.
My half-sister's wealthy partner never replied.

*

My half-sister unfriended me on Facebook.

*
If something bad happens and only you know it, it could be your fault. If something bad happens and only you know it, that does not make it your fault. If something bad happens, other people probably know it. It is not your fault.
My essay about father loss, lack, and legacy is back out on submission.

Jeannine Ouellette's memoir, The Part That Burns, was a 2021 Kirkus Best 100 Indie Book and finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award. Her work appears widely in literary journals including Narrative, Masters Review, NAR, Calyx, and other journals, as well as on her Substack, Writing in the Dark.She teaches through the University of Minnesota, Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and Elephant Rock. Find her at jeannineouellette.com.
Back to Table of Contents

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jeannine Ouellette If something bad happens and only you know it, it could be your fault. Like when Pete slinks home whining and Mama gets down on her knees to look underneath him. Mama's nylons have a run. Sometimes ... Continue reading →

# data[].attributes.headline
No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear

# data[].attributes.subject
No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear

# data[].attributes.body
In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent. By Toni Morrison

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This article is part of The Nation's 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Howard Zinn and many more, here. Ad Policy

Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.

I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, "How are you?" And instead of "Oh, fine-and you?", I blurt out the truth: "Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can't seem to work, to write; it's as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I've begun. I've never felt this way before, but the election...." I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: "No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work-not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job!"

I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed.

Ready to Fight Back? Sign Up For Take Action Now

The list-which covers centuries, not just the last one-is long. A short sample will include Paul Robeson, Primo Levi, Ai Weiwei, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, Dashiell Hammett, Wole Soyinka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lillian Hellman, Salman Rushdie, Herta Müller, Walter Benjamin. An exhaustive list would run into the hundreds.

Dictators and tyrants routinely begin their reigns and sustain their power with the deliberate and calculated destruction of art: the censorship and book-burning of unpoliced prose, the harassment and detention of painters, journalists, poets, playwrights, novelists, essayists. This is the first step of a despot whose instinctive acts of malevolence are not simply mindless or evil; they are also perceptive. Such despots know very well that their strategy of repression will allow the real tools of oppressive power to flourish. Their plan is simple:

1. Select a useful enemy-an "Other"-to convert rage into conflict, even war.

2. Limit or erase the imagination that art provides, as well as the critical thinking of scholars and journalists.

3. Distract with toys, dreams of loot, and themes of superior religion or defiant national pride that enshrine past hurts and humiliations.

The Nation could never have existed or flourished in 1940s Spain, or 2014 Syria, or apartheid South Africa, or 1930s Germany. And the reason is clear. It was born in the United States in 1865, the year of Lincoln's assassination, when political division was stark and lethal-during, as my friend said, times of dread. But no prince or king or dictator could interfere successfully or forever in a country that seriously prized freedom of the press. This is not to say there weren't elements that tried censure, but they could not, over the long haul, win. The Nation, with its history of disruptive, probing, intelligent essays sharing wide space equally with art criticism, reviews, poetry and drama, is as crucial now as it has been for 150 years.

In this contemporary world of violent protests, internecine war, cries for food and peace, in which whole desert cities are thrown up to shelter the dispossessed, abandoned, terrified populations running for their lives and the breath of their children, what are we (the so-called civilized) to do?

The solutions gravitate toward military intervention and/or internment-killing or jailing. Any gesture other than those two in this debased political climate is understood to be a sign of weakness. One wonders why the label "weak" has become the ultimate and unforgivable sin. Is it because we have become a nation so frightened of others, itself and its citizens that it does not recognize true weakness: the cowardice in the insistence on guns everywhere, war anywhere? How adult, how manly is it to shoot abortion doctors, schoolchildren, pedestrians, fleeing black teenagers? How strong, how powerful is the feeling of having a murderous weapon in the pocket, on the hip, in the glove compartment of your car? How leaderly is it to threaten war in foreign affairs simply out of habit, manufactured fear or national ego? And how pitiful? Pitiful because we must know, at some level of consciousness, that the source of and reason for our instilled aggression is not only fear. It is also money: the profit motive of the weapons industry, the financial support of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about.

Forcing a nation to use force is easy when the citizenry is rife with discontent, experiencing feelings of a powerlessness that can be easily soothed by violence. And when the political discourse is shredded by an unreason and hatred so deep that vulgar abuse seems normal, disaffection rules. Our debates, for the most part, are examples unworthy of a playground: name-calling, verbal slaps, gossip, giggles, all while the swings and slides of governance remain empty.

For most of the last five centuries, Africa has been understood to be poor, desperately poor, in spite of the fact that it is outrageously rich in oil, gold, diamonds, precious metals, etc. But since those riches do not, in large part, belong to the people who have lived there all their lives, it has remained in the mind of the West worthy of disdain, sorrow and, of course, pillage. We sometimes forget that colonialism was and is war, a war to control and own another country's resources-meaning money. We may also delude ourselves into thinking that our efforts to "civilize" or "pacify" other countries are not about money. Slavery was always about money: free labor producing money for owners and industries. The contemporary "working poor" and "jobless poor" are like the dormant riches of "darkest colonial Africa"-available for wage theft and property theft, and owned by metastasizing corporations stifling dissident voices.

None of this bodes well for the future. Still, I remember the shout of my friend that day after Christmas: No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge-even wisdom. Like art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This article is part of The Nation's 150th Anniversary Special Issue . Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Howard Zinn and many more, here. Ad Policy Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.

# data[].attributes.headline
Line Randomiser - shuffle your poems and see what happens

# data[].attributes.subject
Line Randomiser - shuffle your poems and see what happens

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What is a text line shuffler?

learn more about this tool

This tool rearranges the order of lines in the given textual data. It uses the Knuth method to do it, aka the Fisher and Yates order permutation algorithm. The behavior of the algorithm changes based on how many lines are shuffled at the same time. By default, it takes every single line in turn (1, 2, 3, ..., n), generates a random number from 1 to n for it, which is the new position, and moves the line to this new place. It can also take several lines at once and move them together without splitting them apart. For example, if you enter the number 2 in the group size option, it will glue the 1st and 2nd lines together and move them together to a new position, then it will take the 3rd and 4th lines together, then the 5th and 6th, and so on. This way, you can shuffle any number of lines and preserve their relative positions. If the "Trim Lines" option is active, the utility removes trailing and leading whitespace in each line before shuffling them. If any of the lines are empty, the program can quickly delete it if the option "Skip Empty Lines" is enabled. Another option that can be useful is "Skip Duplicate Lines". It checks if the current line was already seen in the text before and if so, the application deletes this duplicate. Simple and easy!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Simple, free and easy to use online tool that shuffles lines. No intrusive ads, popups or nonsense, just a line shuffler. Load your text - get its lines mixed.

# data[].attributes.headline
Editing & Feedback Philosophy by Jeannine Ouellette

# data[].attributes.subject
Editing & Feedback Philosophy by Jeannine Ouellette

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Often-very often, in fact-I hear from students about the bad workshop experiences they've endured. Casual cruelty delivered as so-called "feedback." Observations untethered from the words on the page (that is to say, judgments of the writer, not the writing). Sometimes, these students are seasoned enough or just plain wise enough to suspect the problem ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Often-very often, in fact-I hear from students about the bad workshop experiences they've endured. Casual cruelty delivered as so-called "feedback." Observations untethered from the words on the page (that is to say, judgments of the writer, not the writing). Sometimes, these students are seasoned enough or just plain wise enough to suspect the problem ...

# data[].attributes.body
Writing about trauma as a subversive act, Melissa Febos

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a recent nonfiction workshop I taught at Sarah Lawrence College, a female student cringed when I suggested she include more of her own story in an essay. The narrative experimented with form, suggested a history of sexual trauma, but quickly shifted into a more lyrical and analytic musing on the general subject. She frowned. "But I don't want to seem self-absorbed. You know, navel-gazing." The rest of the room-all women-nodded. It is a concern I have heard from countless students and peers, and which I always greet with a combination of bafflement and frustration. Since when did telling our own stories and deriving their insights become so reviled? It doesn't matter if the story is your own, I tell them over and over, only that you tell it well. We must always tell stories so that their specificity reveals some universal truth.

And yet. How many times have I been privy to conversations among other writers in which we sneer at the very concept? We compulsively assure one another that writing isn't about enacting a kind of therapy. How gross! We are intellectuals. We are artists. And the assumption is that these occupations preclude emotional self-examination or healing. "I mean, you can't expect people to be interested in your diary," a friend and fellow teacher recently exclaimed. I nodded. What kind of monstrous narcissist would make that mistake?

I am complicit. I have committed this betrayal of my own experience innumerable times. But I am done agreeing when my peers spit on the idea of writing as transformation, as catharsis, as-dare I say it-therapy. Tell me, who is writing in their therapeutic diary and then dashing it off to be published? I don't know who these supposedly self-indulgent (and extravagantly well-connected) narcissists are. But I suspect that when people denigrate them in the abstract, they are picturing women. I'm finished referring to stories of body and sex and gender and violence and joy and childhood and family as "navel-gazing."

At a recent writers conference, during a panel of literary magazine editors, a female audience member posed a question about the potential audience for her story of trauma survival. One of the male editors rolled his eyes and shrugged. "I mean, I'm not sure we need any more of those stories." The other panelists nodded in consensus: Stories like hers belonged on Oprah's talk show, not in the hallowed realm of literary prose. Everyone knows we don't need another one of those. The genre of victimhood is already so crowded. So gauche.

Later that day, while serving on a panel of memoirists, I polled the audience-a room packed with a few hundred readers and writers. I asked for a show of hands: "Who here has experienced an act of violence, abuse, extreme disempowerment, sexual aggression, harassment, or humiliation?" The room fell silent as the air filled with hands.

***

In response to a surge of popular memoirs, William Gass, in a 1994 issue of Harper's, asked, "Are there any motives for the enterprise that aren't tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? To halo a sinner's head? To puff an ego already inflated past safety?" He went on: "To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster.... Why is it so exciting to say, now that everyone knows it anyway, 'I was born...I was born...I was born'?'" It is an argument that has been made for centuries, and that I have heard all my writing life.

It is the reason that I did not want to write a memoir. At twenty-six I was an MFA student in fiction, deep into what I believed was a Very Important Novel about addiction and female sexuality. Then I took a nonfiction craft class for which we were asked to write a short memoir. Though the content of my novel drew heavily from my own experience, I had never written any kind of nonfiction. The twenty-page essay I drafted about my years as a professional dominatrix was the most urgent thing I had ever written. When he read it, my professor insisted that I drop whatever I was working on and write a memoir.

I cringed. Who was I, a twenty-six-year-old woman, a former junkie and sex worker, to presume that strangers should find my life interesting? I had already learned that there were few more damning presumptions than that of a young woman thinking her own story might be meaningful. Besides, I was writing a Very Important Novel. Just like Jonathan Franzen or Philip Roth or Hemingway, those men of renowned humility.

"No way," I told my professor. I was determined to stick to my more humble presumption that strangers might be interested in a story made up by a twenty-six-year-old former junkie sex worker.

Do you see how easy it is to poke holes in this logic?

But the story wouldn't leave me alone. So I wrote it. And it was urgent, but not easy. In order to write that book, I had to walk back through my most mystifying choices and excavate events for which I had been numb on the first go-round.

That book was about being a sex worker and recovering from heroin addiction. It was about desire, shame, bodies, drugs, and money. It was an intellectual inquiry into these topics as much as it was a psychological and emotional reckoning. In hindsight, I can say that the compulsion to write it was an expression of my need to understand what the connections were among those things. To answer my own questions about why a girl from a loving family ended up shooting speedballs and spanking men for a living, and how the power of secrecy could become a prison. I wrote it because I wanted to show the strangers who shared those experiences that they were not alone.

I didn't write a memoir to free myself, though in the process I did.

***

In the 1980s, social psychologist James Pennebaker conducted some now famous studies on his theory of "expressive writing." Pennebaker asked participants in his experimental group to write about a past trauma, expressing their deepest feelings surrounding it. In contrast, control participants were asked to write as objectively as possible about neutral topics without revealing their emotions or opinions. Both groups wrote for fifteen minutes for four consecutive days.

Some of the participants in the experimental group found the exercise upsetting. All of them found it valuable. Monitoring over the subsequent year revealed that those participants made significantly fewer visits to physicians. Pennebaker's research has since been replicated numerous times and his results confirmed: Expressive writing about trauma strengthens the immune system, decreases obsessive thinking, and contributes to the overall health of the writers. And this is after only four days of fifteen-minute sessions.

Let's face it: If you write about your wounds, it is therapy. Of course, the writing done in those fifteen minutes was surely terrible by artistic standards. But it is a logical fallacy to conclude that any writing with therapeutic effect is terrible. You don't have to be into therapy to be healed by writing. Being healed does not have to be your goal. But to oppose the very idea of it is nonsensical, unless you consider what such a bias reveals about our values as a culture. Knee-jerk bias backed by flimsy logic and bad science has always been the disguise of our national prejudices.

That these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms, and are all associated with the female spheres of being is not a coincidence. What I mean is, this bias against "personal writing" is a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.

That is, Karl Ove Knausgaard is a genius, a risk-taker, while all my female graduate students are terrified to write about being mothers for fear that they will be deemed (or, that they already are) vacuous narcissists. Or, as Maggie Nelson, in her latest book, The Argonauts, says of a man inquiring how she could possibly pen a book on the subject of cruelty while pregnant: "Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks."

I suspect I could write something relevant and dynamic and political and beautiful and intellectual about my own navel. And I don't think it's a stretch to wonder if the navel as the locus of all this disdain has some faint thing to do with its connection to birth, and body, and the female.

***

Acknowledging all of this will not get your book published. Being healed by writing does not excuse you from the insanely hard work of making art. There are plenty of mediocre memoirs out there, just as there are plenty of mediocre novels. I labored endlessly to craft my memoir. But after it was published, I still fielded insinuations that I had gotten away with publishing my diary. Interviewers asked only about my experiences and never about my craft. At readings, I would be billed on posters as "Melissa Febos, former dominatrix" alongside my co-reader, "[insert male writer name], poet." Even some friends, after reading the book, would write to me to exclaim, "The writing! It was so good," as if that were a happy accident accompanying my diarist's transcription.

Writing about your personal experiences is not easier than other kinds of writing. In order to write that book, I had to invest the time and energy to conduct research and craft plot, scenes, description, dialogue, pacing-all the writer's jobs, and I had to destroy my own self-image and face some unpalatable truths about my own accountability. It was the hardest thing I'd ever done. It made me a better person, and it made a better book.

Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you. For many years, I kept a quote from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet tacked over my desk: "The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you."

***

Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or beating a dead horse. Believe me, I wish this horse were dead. To name just one of many such statistics in a grossly underreported set of crimes: The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey recently found that 46.4 percent of lesbians, 74.9 percent of bisexual women, and 43.3 percent of heterosexual women have been the victims of sexual violence.

But we shouldn't write about it because people are fatigued by stories about trauma? No. We have been discouraged from writing about it because it makes people uncomfortable. Because a patriarchal society wants its victims to be silent. Because shame is an effective method of silencing.

***

I have just finished writing a second book about my own experience. It's called Abandon Me, and it's about having a sea captain father, about loving women, about being annihilated and invented by love and sex. It is an exercise in applying my intellect, and the intellects of other thinkers-philosophers, psychologists, holy people, poets-to the raw matter of my own abandonments. It is about having abandonment issues.

This sort of admission might make you cringe. But white straight male writers are writing about the same things-they are just overlaying them with a plot about baseball, or calling their work fiction. Men write about their daddy issues constantly, and I don't see anyone accusing them of navel-gazing. I am happy to read those books. I just wish that male authors-along with the greater reading populace-were not discouraged from reading such books by women. That women were not discouraged from writing them.

The new book is a collection of linked essays, and I have never worked so hard, sentence by sentence, image by image, on anything. But I struggled with the title essay, which, at over 150 pages, is more than half the book and tells the story of a time when I lost myself in love, acted in ways I would never have believed until they happened.

I showed an early draft of the essay to a close friend. After reading it, she said: "This is a very pretty story, but this is not what happened. If you want to tell the real story, you are going to have to be more honest." My heart sank. I knew she was right. I had included only the parts that I felt safe revealing. I had hidden the ugliest parts. When I thought about taking her advice, a cold fear surged through me. "I am not allowed to write this," I thought. "No one can know how profoundly I lost myself." But I knew that she was right. So I rewrote it. I faced the truer version that I had tried to avoid. Because it was a better story, and because I wanted to be free.

What I'm saying is, don't avoid yourself. The story that comes calling might be your own, and it might not go away if you don't open the door. I don't believe in writers block. I only believe in fear. And you can be afraid and still write something. No one has to read it, though when you're done you might want someone to. One of the epigraphs of my book is a quote from the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: "It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found." The book I've written is about secrets, too. About my father's father, who terrorized his family; about my mother's father, who was mad. About my biological father, his father, and his grandfather-who lied on a census and said he was Polish, instead of native. It's about the legacy of those secrets, how they ruined us for generations, how they have formed me.

To William Gass's argument, "To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster," I say that refusing to write your story can make you into a monster. Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation.

Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me. And I believe that stories like these have the power to transform the world. That is the point of literature, or at least that's what I tell my students. We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to one another.

What I mean is, tell me about your navel. Tell me about your rape. Tell me about your mad love affair, how you forgot and then remembered yourself. Tell me about your hands, the things they have done and held and hit and let go of. Tell me about your drunk father and your sister who lost her mind. Give them whatever names you want.

Don't tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet's human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don't tell me that you think there's not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That's how it gets bigger.

You write it, and I will read it.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life (St. Martin's Press, 2010), and an essay collection, Abandon Me, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in February. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Granta, Prairie Schooner, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Monmouth University and the Institute of American Indian Arts and serves on the board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her website is melissafebos.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma as a Subversive Act

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a recent nonfiction workshop I taught at Sarah Lawrence College, a female student cringed when I suggested she include more of her own story in an essay. The narrative experimented with form, suggested a history of sexual trauma, but quickly shifted into a more lyrical and analytic musing on the general subject.

# data[].attributes.body
Daily Journalling / Depression and Writing / Writing the Self, Frank Bure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Growing up, I only knew that my grandma had been "sick." Later I heard more, and learned that she had taken her own life. But it wasn't until I started researching a book about culture-bound syndromes that I uncovered the fuller version: Late one night, in 1968, my grandma woke up, opened a bottle of barbiturates, swallowed them all, then climbed back into bed. The next morning my grandfather found her body next to his. She was fifty-six years old. They had been married since she was sixteen and he was nineteen.

At the time the doctors said she had a nervous breakdown, or sometimes that she was depressed. But that meant something different to the doctors than it meant to her family. And as I researched my book, it started to become clear that even today it probably means something different to everyone around the world.

Rates of depression vary widely. In Korea or Japan you have a one in fifty chance of having experienced major depression over the past twelve months, while in Brazil your chance is one in ten. Symptoms vary too. According to Handbook of Depression, a textbook on mood disorders, Koreans and Korean Americans experience manifestations that others would never consider related to depression: constipation, abdominal cramps, heartburn, stiff joints, sore muscles, and increased heart rate. In cultures where excitement and happiness are considered normal, people with major depression show low energy and blunted emotional response. In cultures where emotional control is considered the norm, the opposite is true: Intensified emotional responses are a common symptom of depression. The British psychiatrist Christopher Dowrick, author of Beyond Depression: A New Approach to Understanding and Management (Oxford University Press, 2004), has suggested that depression itself should be considered a culture-bound syndrome.

Culture-bound syndromes (or "cultural syndromes," as they're now called) are mental illnesses that mainly occur in certain cultures and that are shaped by those cultures. They are things like koro, a genital-retraction syndrome found in Asia and Africa; or khyâl cap, which is a panic-related condition from Cambodia whereby the wind flowing through one's body is believed to be blocked; or taijin kyofusho, a paralyzing fear of other people's embarrassment (not your own) that strikes people in Japan.

When I started researching these conditions, there seemed to be a clear line between them and the depression that afflicted my grandmother. But as I dug deeper, that line began to blur. The belief in the United States that depression is biochemical or genetic in nature-always assumed, but never proven-began to seem culture-bound as well. How could something so big, so terrible, and (sometimes) so final differ so much around the globe, or across a family?

My father, my two brothers, and I are all prone to waves of darkness rolling through our lives, which does point to a likely hereditary component. And yet the way it has played out in all our lives is so different that we each might as well be living in his own country: My youngest brother turned to religion at age fifteen, which is still his source of great joy. My other brother spent many years self-medicating before joining Alcoholics Anonymous, after which he felt better. As for me, while I've sunk into dark places many times, for a variety of reasons I have never gone all the way down my grandmother's road.

If depression were a simple biomechanical process, a series of cellular dominoes falling, the effects should be more uniform from Korea to Kenya to Kansas. But they're not. And after spending several years reading and thinking about these things, I now see that there is something else at work. Something layered over, and woven through, our biology.

I came across this almost by accident, when someone recommended the work of James Pennebaker, a social psychologist who did some of the first studies into the effects of "expressive writing" on health. His interest started in college, at a time when his marriage was falling apart and he fell into a depressive spiral. He started smoking. He drank more. He stopped eating.

Then, after a month, he started writing, first about his marriage, then about his feelings, his parents, his career, death, and so on. "By the end of the week," he wrote in Opening Up: The Healing Power of Confiding in Others (William Morrow, 1990), "I noticed my depression lifting. For the first time in years-perhaps ever-I had a sense of meaning and direction."

So he embarked on a series of experiments in which students wrote about various topics-some emotional, some not. Those who wrote about their emotions experienced a bizarre health benefit: Their trips to the campus health center dropped by half. Their immune function increased. Yet those who merely "vented" about trauma, or who wrote on superficial events, saw no such benefit.

Another of his studies focused on almost fifty professionals (average age fifty-two years) who had been laid off from a computer company in Dallas, where most had worked for thirty years. All were fired the same day, with no warning, and, as Pennebaker noted, were "among the most bitter and hostile group of adults I have ever seen."

One group was instructed to write about "their deepest thoughts and feelings about getting laid off," for thirty minutes each day for five days. Another group wrote about time management. And a third (control) group didn't write anything. Within three months, 27 percent of the first group had found jobs, while only 5 percent of the second two groups did. Several months later, 53 percent of the first group had jobs, compared to 18 percent of the other groups.

Having kept a journal since my late teens, I found this fascinating. Writing in it has always made me feel better, though while I was doing it I had no idea why. I told myself I kept it to collect material that would later become essays and stories. But honestly, there was never much worthwhile in those pages. Mostly it was just me trying to figure out why I felt so bad, or working through problems, or trying to figure out what kind of person I was. I rarely looked at the pages I left behind.

But I kept writing in the journal, first when I went overseas alone, then again when I traveled with my wife. Not long after we returned to the States, having settled in Madison, Wisconsin, I stopped journaling without knowing why. Whenever I opened the pages, it seemed tedious, pointless, and painful. The little I did write felt trivial. I wondered for whom I was
writing: Who would care about these things? I started losing touch with old friends and made few new ones. I had no idea who the audience for my stories might be.

Fortunately, I still had an audience of one-my wife-who grew alarmed at the dark turn I had taken, which showed no sign of passing. I felt a strange, new kind of hopelessness that went all the way to my fingertips. Soon she insisted we leave Madison, and within a few weeks our house was on the market (we had one daughter and another child on the way). This time we moved to Minneapolis, and after that things slowly began to improve. Fitfully, I started writing in my journal again.

All this made more sense when I read Pennebaker's work. But it made even more sense when I stumbled into the field of "self-affirmation" research (not to be confused with "self-esteem"), which uses short writing exercises to change the way people see themselves. One of the most common is to write for ten minutes or so about your values, about why they are important to you, or about a time when those values came into play.

Repeated just a few times, these exercises can have significant effects. They can boost students' gpa for years. They can improve subjects' health and relationships. The reasons for their power are not fully understood, but it seems to have something to do with expanding your sense of self, of who you are, and of what caused you to become that person.

In a 2014 overview of this research, Geoffrey Cohen and David Sherman noted that "the self" can be best understood as a kind of "storyteller" with "a powerful need to see itself as having integrity." We need to believe we are good people, moral people, and that we can achieve the goals we set for ourselves. This is what Cohen and Sherman call a "narrative of personal adequacy."

Yet the world does not always confirm our adequacy. In fact, it often tells us the opposite, in the clear language of failure, rejection, exclusion, pain, and other unpleasant things. These can threaten the idea of our self. And when the idea of our self begins to crumble and we can't quite hold it together, it can take an emotional and physical toll. Long before anyone talked about this kind of thing, the psychiatrist George Engel looked at cases of 170 people who died suddenly and unexpectedly. He found that there were various circumstances that precipitated death: the loss of a spouse, child, sibling, or friend; denial of a promotion; loss of a job; a robbery; the demolition of a hotel where one man worked for thirty years; and a reconciliation with long-lost family members. Engel noted that these episodes marked periods of extreme excitement, loss of control, or "giving up." Many involved the sense that the person "no longer has, or no longer believes that he has, mastery or control over the situation, or even over himself," Engel wrote. In other words, when your sense of self unravels, your actual self can too.

Writing affirmations seems to offer some protection from these slings and arrows. In one study that Cohen and Sherman cited, both affirmed and non-affirmed people were shown a live caged tarantula. The affirmed group correctly judged the distance between themselves and the spider. Non-affirmed people saw the threat as physically closer than it really was. When the story we've told ourselves about who we are is threatened, the world feels more dangerous. Things can look more dire, more risky, more hopeless than they are. That's a feeling I remember clearly. It's one I'm sure my grandma knew well.

Culture-bound or not, depression is a complex beast. Even today there are no known physiological causes, despite our perennial assumption that these will soon be found. There is no biological test you can take for it. That's why, for me, the intersection of narrative and neurology is where a key piece of this puzzle can be found.

Surely nothing as simple as a notebook and a pencil could have saved my grandma, just as when things turned darkest for me, my wife had to intervene. Yet I still feel lucky that I became a writer when I did. Because for years those journal pages helped me hold myself together when the world pulled me apart. They helped me figure out who I was, who I wanted to be, and how to bridge the distance between the two.

But most important, I see now that in all those years when I thought I was writing one kind of story, I was writing another. Now when I open my journal, I know which story that is. I know why I'm writing it. And I know the end is still a long way off.

Frank Bures is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Writing the Self: Some Thoughts on Words and Woe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Growing up, I only knew that my grandma had been "sick." Later I heard more, and learned that she had taken her own life. But it wasn't until I started researching a book about culture-bound syndromes that I uncovered the fuller version: Late one night, in 1968, my grandma woke up, opened a bottle of barbiturates, swallowed them all, then climbed back into bed.

# data[].attributes.body
Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande - background resource, published 1934

# data[].attributes.body
an essay about how, at the moment the reader enters the dynamic, the authors intentions are obsolete. There are very strong opinions for and against this essay - I'd be really interested in which way you go on it x

# data[].attributes.body
I HIGHLY recommend signing up to this newsletter and making space to read it each week, it's a huge influence on my writing and just an absolutely stunning publication

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Two years before she fused her childhood impression of a mechanical loom with her devotedly honed gift for mathematics to compose the world's first computer program in a 65-page footnote, Ada Lovelace postulated in a letter that creativity is the art of discovering and combining - the work of an alert imagination that "seizes points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition."

Her father - the poet Lord Byron, rockstar of the Romantics - embodied this in his own work, fusing influences* as diffuse in time, space, and sensibility as Confucius and Virgil, Erasmus Darwin and Mary Shelley, Greek tragedy and Galilean astronomy, to compose some of the world's most original* and enduring poetry.

A century and a poetic revolution after him, Rilke captured this combinatorial nature of creativity when he contemplated what it takes to write anything of beauty and substance.

All poets - "poets" in Baldwin's broad sense of "the only people who know the truth about us," encompassing all artists, all makers of beauty and knowledge, all shamans of our self-knowledge - understand this intimately, and therefore understand the most elemental truth about creativity: that *these two words are chimeras of the ego.

There is no blank slate upon which works of true originality are composed, no void out of which total novelty is created. Nothing is original because everything is an influence; everything is original because no influence makes its way into our art untransmuted by our imagination. We bring to everything we make everything we have lived and loved and tessellated into the mosaic of our being. To be an artist in the largest sense is to be fully awake to the totality of life as we encounter it, porous to it and absorbent of it, moved by it and moved to translate those inner quickenings into what we make.

That is what Nick Cave, part Byron and part Baldwin for our own time, explores in an issue of his Red Hand Files - the online journal in which he takes questions from fans and answers them in miniature essays of uncommon insight, soulfulness, and sensitivity, opening up improbable backdoors into those cavernous chambers where our most private yet common bewilderments about art and life dwell, and filling those chambers with the light of sympathetic understanding.

When a fan from my own neighborough asks Cave how he muffles all of his influences in order to hear his own inner voice and trust that he is making something wholly his own, he answers with his characteristic poetics of numinous pragmatism:

Nothing you create is ultimately your own, yet all of it is you. Your imagination, it seems to me, is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence, and is not intrinsic to you, rather it is a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.

Your spirit is the part of you that is essential. It is separate from the imagination, and belongs only to you. This formless pneuma is the invisible and vital force over which we toss the blanket of our imagination - that habitual mix of received information, of memory, of experience - to give it form and language. In some this vital spirit burns fiercely and in others it is a dim flicker, but it lives in all of us, and can be made stronger through daily devotion to the work at hand.

In consonance with Black Mountain College poet and ceramicist M.C. Richards's lovely notion of creativity as the poetry of our personhood and with anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson's concept of "composing a life" - which captures with such poetic precision the fundamental fact that our very lives are the ultimate creative work - Cave adds:

Worry less about what you make - that will mostly look after itself, and is to some extent beyond your control, and perhaps even none of your business - and devote yourself to nourishing this animating spirit. Bring all your enthusiasm to bear on the development of that good and essential force. This is done by a commitment to the creative act itself. Each time you tend to that ingenious spark it grows stronger, and sets afire the ordinary gifts of the imagination. The more dedication you show to the process, the better the work, and the greater your gift to the world. Apply yourself fully to the task, let go of the outcome, and your true voice will appear. You'll see. It can be no other way.

There are echoes here of Whitman, who declared in his "Laws of Creation" for "strong artists and leaders... and coming musicians" that to create means only to "satisfy the Soul"; there are echoes, too, of Mary Oliver and her invocation of "the third self" - that crucible of our creative energy, which demands of us to give it both power and time.

Complement with Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of algorithms and grief as a portal to aliveness, then revisit poet Naomi Shihab Nye on the two driving forces of creativity, John Coltrane on outsiderdom as a wellspring of originality, John McPhee on the relationship between originality and self-doubt, and Paul Klee on how an artist is like at tree.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nick Cave on Creativity, the Myth of Originality, and How to Find Your Voice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Two years before she fused her childhood impression of a mechanical loom with her devotedly honed gift for mathematics to compose the world's first computer program in a 65-page footnote, Ada Lovelace postulated in a letter that creativity is the art of discovering and combining - the work of an alert imagination that "seizes points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition."

# data[].attributes.body
She is just fabulous

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Literature Matters: Top Tips with Salena Godden

# data[].attributes.body
a very good essay on 'why write?'

# data[].attributes.body
Elizabeth Gilbert's Ted Talk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Your elusive creative genius | Elizabeth Gilbert

# data[].attributes.body
by Bernadette Mayer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Bernadette Mayer's List of Journal Ideas:
 Journals of: * dreams * food * finances * writing ideas * love * ideas for architects * city design ideas * beautiful and/or ugly sights * a history of one's own writing life, written daily * reading/music/art, etc. encountered each day * rooms * elaborations on weather * people one sees-description * subway, bus, car or other trips (e.g., the same bus trip written about every day) * pleasures and/or pain * life's everyday machinery: phones, stoves, computers, etc. * answering machine messages * round or rectangular things, other shapes * color * light * daily changes, e.g., a journal of one's desk, table, etc. * the body and its parts * clocks/time-keeping * tenant-landlord situations * telephone calls (taped?) * skies * dangers * mail * sounds * coincidences & connections * times of solitude Other journal ideas: * Write once a day in minute detail about one thing * Write every day at the same time, e.g. lunch poems, waking ideas, etc. * Write minimally: one line or sentence per day * Create a collaborative journal: musical notation and poetry; two writers alternating days; two writing about the same subject each day, etc. * Instead of using a book, write on paper and put it up on the wall (public journal). * and so on ...Bernadette Mayer's Writing Experiments * Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a few ideas have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with a non- connotative word, like "so" etc. * Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from a piece of writing: eliminate all adjectives from a poem of your own, or take out all words beginning with 's' in Shakespeare's sonnets. * Rewrite someone else's writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism. * Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of prepositional phrases, or, add a gerund to every line of an already existing work. * Get a group of words, either randomly selected or thought up, then form these words (only) into a piece of writing-whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form, or, use some words in a predetermined way. Design words. * Eliminate material systematically from a piece of your own writing until it is "ultimately" reduced, or, read or write it backwards, line by line or word by word. Read a novel backwards. * Using phrases relating to one subject or idea, write about another, pushing metaphor and simile as far as you can. For example, use science terms to write about childhood or philosophic language to describe a shirt. * Take an idea, anything that interests you, or an object, then spend a few days looking and noticing, perhaps making notes on what comes up about that idea, or, try to create a situation or surrounding where everything that happens is in relation. * Construct a poem as if the words were three-dimensional objects to be handled in space. Print them on large cards or bricks if necessary. * Write as you think, as close as you can come to this, that is, put pen to paper and don't stop. Experiment writing fast and writing slow. * Attempt tape recorder work, that is, recording without a text, perhaps at specific times. * Make notes on what happens or occurs to you for a limited amount of time, then make something of it in writing. * Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you. * Write in a strict form, or, transform prose into a poetic form. * Write a poem that reflects another poem, as in a mirror. * Read or write a story or myth, then put it aside and, trying to remember it, write it five or ten times at intervals from memory. Or, make a work out of continuously saying, in a column or list, one sentence or line, over and over in different ways, until you get it "right." * Make a pattern of repetitions. * Take an already written work of your own and insert, at random or by choice, a paragraph or section from, for example, a psychology book or a seed catalogue. Then study the possibilities of rearranging this work or rewriting the "source." * Experiment with writing in every person and tense every day. * Explore the possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries, almanacs, etc. Consult the thesaurus where categories for the word "word" include: word as news, word as message, word as information, word as story, word as order or command, word as vocable, word as instruction, promise, vow, contract. * Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index. * The possibilities of synesthesia in relation to language and words: the word and the letter as sensations, colors evoked by letters, sensations caused by the sound of a word as apart from its meaning, etc. And the effect of this phenomenon on you; for example, write in the water, on a moving vehicle. * Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial. * Consider word and letter as forms-the concretistic distortion of a text, a mutiplicity of o's or ea's, or a pleasing visual arrangement: "the mill pond of chill doubt." * Do experiments with sensory memory: record all sense images that remain from breakfast, study which senses engage you, escape you. * Write, taking off from visual projections, whether mental or mechanical, without thought to the word in the ordinary sense, no craft. * Make writing experiments over a long period of time. For example, plan how much you will write for a particular work each day, perhaps one word or one page. * Write on a piece of paper where something is already printed or written. * Attempt to eliminate all connotation from a piece of writing and vice versa. * Experiment with writing in a group, collaborative work: a group writing individually off of each other's work over a long period of time in the same room; a group contributing to the same work, sentence by sentence or line by line; one writer being fed information and ideas while the other writes; writing, leaving instructions for another writer to fill in what you can't describe; compiling a book or work structured by your own language around the writings of others; or a group working and writing off of each other's dream writing. * Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind's activity or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream characters into fictional characters, accept dream's language as a gift. * Structure a poem or prose writing according to city streets, miles, walks, drives. For example: Take a fourteen-block walk, writing one line per block to create a sonnet; choose a city street familiar to you, walk it, make notes and use them to create a work; take a long walk with a group of writers, observe, make notes and create works, then compare them; take a long walk or drive-write one line or sentence per mile. Variations on this. * The uses of journals. Keep a journal that is restricted to one set of ideas, for instance, a food or dream journal, a journal that is only written in when it is raining, a journal of ideas about writing, a weather journal. Remember that journals do not have to involve "good" writing-they are to be made use of. Simple one-line entries like "No snow today" can be inspiring later. Have 3 or 4 journals going at once, each with a different purpose. Create a journal that is meant to be shared and commented on by another writer--leave half of each page blank for the comments of the other. * Type out a Shakespeare sonnet or other poem you would like to learn about/imitate double-spaced on a page. Rewrite it in between the lines. * Find the poems you think are the worst poems ever written, either by your own self or other poets. Study them, then write a bad poem. * Choose a subject you would like to write "about." Then attempt to write a piece that absolutely avoids any relationship to that subject. Get someone to grade you. * Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses. * Work with a number of objects, moving them around on a field or surface-describe their shifting relationships, resonances, associations. Or, write a series of poems that have only to do with what you see in the place where you most often write. Or, write a poem in each room of your house or apartment. Experiment with doing this in the home you grew up in, if possible. * Write a bestiary (a poem about real and mythical animals). * Write five short expressions of the most adamant anger; make a work out of them. * Write a work gazing into a mirror without using the pronoun I. * A shocking experiment: Rip pages out of books at random (I guess you could xerox them) and study them as if they were a collection of poetic/literary material. Use this method on your old high school or college notebooks, if possible, then create an epistemological work based on the randomly chosen notebook pages. * Meditate on a word, sound or list of ideas before beginning to write. * Take a book of poetry you love and make a list, going through it poem by poem, of the experiments, innovations, methods, intentions, etc. involved in the creation of the works in the book. * Write what is secret. Then write what is shared. Experiment with writing each in two different ways: veiled language, direct language. * Write a soothing novel in twelve short paragraphs. * Write a work that attempts to include the names of all the physical contents of the terrestrial world that you know. * Take a piece of prose writing and turn it into poetic lines. Then, without remembering that you were planning to do this, make a poem of the first and last words of each line to see what happens. For instance, the lines (from Einstein) * When at the reception * Of sense-impressions, memory pictures * Emerge this is not yet thinking * And when. . . * Would become: * When reception * Of pictures * Emerge thinking * And when * And so on. Form the original prose, poetic lines, and first-and-last word poem into three columns on a page. Study their relationships. * If you have an answering machine, record all messages received for one month, then turn them into a best-selling novella. * Write a macaronic poem (making use of as many languages as you are conversant with). * Attempt to speak for a day only in questions; write only in questions. * Attempt to become in a state where the mind is flooded with ideas; attempt to keep as many thoughts in mind simultaneously as possible. Then write without looking at the page, typescript or computer screen (This is "called" invisible writing). * Choose a period of time, perhaps five or nine months. Every day, write a letter that will never be sent to a person who does or does not exist, or to a number of people who do or do not exist. Create a title for each letter and don't send them. Pile them up as a book. * Etymological work. Experiment with investigating the etymologies of all words that interest you, including your own name(s). Approaches to etymologies: Take a work you've already written, preferably something short, look up the etymological meanings of every word in that work including words like "the" and "a". Study the histories of the words used, then rewrite the work on the basis of the etymological information found out. Another approach: Build poems and writings form the etymological families based on the Indo-European language constructs, for instance, the BHEL family: bulge, bowl, belly, boulder, billow, ball, balloon; or the OINO family: one, alone, lonely, unique, unite, unison, union; not to speak of one of the GEN families: kin, king, kindergarten, genteel, gender, generous, genius, genital, gingerly, pregnant, cognate, renaissance, and innate! * Write a brief bibliography of the science and philosophy texts that interest you. Create a file of newspaper articles that seem to relate to the chances of writing poetry. * Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them. * Diagram a sentence in the old-fashioned way. If you don't know how, I'll be happy to show you; if you do know how, try a really long sentence, for instance from Melville. * Turn a list of the objects that have something to do with a person who has died into a poem or poem form, in homage to that person. * Write the same poem over and over again, in different forms, until you are weary. Another experiment: Set yourself the task of writing for four hours at a time, perhaps once, twice or seven times a week. Don't stop until hunger and/or fatigue take over. At the very least, always set aside a four-hour period once a month in which to write. This is always possible and will result in one book of poems or prose writing for each year. Then we begin to know something. * Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how thought becomes language, or does not. * Take a traditional text like the pledge of allegiance to the flag. For every noun, replace it with one that is seventh or ninth down from the original one in the dictionary. For instance, the word "honesty" would be replaced by "honey dew melon." Investigate what happens; different dictionaries will produce different results. * Attempt to write a poem or series of poems that will change the world. Does everything written or dreamed of do this? * Write occasional poems for weddings, for rivers, for birthdays, for other poets' beauty, for movie stars maybe, for the anniversaries of all kinds of loving meetings, for births, for moments of knowledge, for deaths. Writing for the "occasion" is part of our purpose as poets in being-this is our work in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others. * Experiment with every traditional form, so as to know it. * Write poems and proses in which you set yourself the task of using particular words, chosen at random like the spelling exercises of children: intelligence, amazing, weigh, weight, camel, camel's, foresight, through, threw, never, now, snow, rein, rain. Make a story of that! * Plan, structure, and write a long work. Consider what is the work now needed by the culture to cure and exact even if by accident the great exorcism of its 1998 sort-of- seeming-not-being. What do we need? What is the poem of the future? * What is communicable now? What more is communicable? * Compose a list of familiar phrases, or phrases that have stayed in your mind for a long time--from songs, from poems, from conversation: * What's in a name? That which we call a rose * By any other name would smell as sweet * (Romeo and Juliet) * A rose is a rose is a rose * (Gertrude Stein) * A raisin in the sun * (Langston Hughes) * The king was in the counting house * Counting out his money. . . * (Nursery rhyme) * I sing the body electric. . . * These United States. . . * (Walt Whitman) * A thing of beauty is a joy forever * (Keats) * (I summon up) remembrance of things past * (WS) * Ask not for whom the bell tolls * It tolls for thee * (Donne) * Look homeward, Angel * (Milton) * For fools rush in where angels fear to tread * (Pope) * All's well that ends well * (WS) * I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness * (Allen Ginsberg) * I think therefore I am * (Descartes) * It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,. . . * (Dickens) * brave new world has such people in it * (Shakespeare, The Tempest, later Huxley) * Odi et amo (I hate and I love) * (Catullus) * Water water everywhere * Nor any drop to drink * (Coleridge) * Curiouser and curiouser * (Alice in Wonderland) * Don't worry be happy. Here's a little song I wrote. . . * Write the longest most beautiful sentence you can imagine-make it be a whole page. * Set yourself the task of writing in a way you've never written before, no matter who you are. * What is the value of autobiography? * Attempt to write in a way that's never been written before. * Invent a new form. * Write a perfect poem. * Write a work that intersperses love with landlords. * In a poem, list what you know. * Address the poem to the reader. * Write household poems-about cooking, shopping, eating and sleeping. * Write dream collabortations in the lune form. * Write poems that only make use of the words included in Basic English. * Attempt to write about jobs and how they affect the writing of poetry. * Write while being read to from science texts, or, write while being read to by one's lover from any text. * Trade poems with others and do not consider them your own. * Exercises in style: Write twenty-five or more different versions of one event. * Review the statement: "What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems."

The experiments list here is expanded from Bernadette Mayer's Experiemnts List,
published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E #3, 1978: pdf here. This first-published list was created by Bernadette and her St. Mark's workshop 1971-1975.
.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bernadette Mayer's List of Journal Ideas: Journals of: * dreams * food * finances * writing ideas * love * ideas for architects * city design ideas * beautiful and/or ugly sights * a history of one's own writing life, written daily * reading/music/art, etc.

# data[].attributes.headline
Session Prompts from Writing the Self weeks

# data[].attributes.subject
Session Prompts from Writing the Self weeks

# data[].attributes.body
A list of prompts I used in the last mentorship programme - you may also find useful

# data[].attributes.body
Powerful spoken word poem.

# data[].attributes.body
Example of the orality of poetry and its crossovers with song lyrics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lady Gaga's Poker Face read by Christopher Walken - Friday Night with Jonathan Ross - BBC One

# data[].attributes.body
Example of a 'sound poem'.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Schwitters - Ursonate - Complete Poem (with Verses Displayed)

# data[].attributes.headline
Found this excellent interview with Zawe Ashton, about her "voice" 

# data[].attributes.subject
Found this excellent interview with Zawe Ashton, about her "voice" 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Introducing zawe ashton: actress, writer, amateur interior designer and all-rounder incarnate

Zawe Ashton is what you might call a Renaissance Woman. A polymath, if you will. In the olden days we would have called her a witch. Or worse: a feminist icon. Part actor, director, producer, playwright, poet and novelist, she is regularly referred to as the coolest thing on TV, is quite the philanthropist and - I discover after a little Facebook stalking - is equally at ease on the decks, too. All in all, I'm a little in awe of Zawe - which, by the way, doesn't rhyme; think Zawe as in, "Wowee zowee, is there anything this girl can't do?"

Yes, actually. Zawe Ashton is a flake. Winding her way through white linened tables to ours, she meets an old friend. "I've known him since I was six! It's so nice, but so London. We bump into each other, say we must catch up and, every time, just see each other walking 'round Soho."

Even this she's working on: "It's one of my resolutions: not to be a London flake. To follow through on plans, put something in the diary. I'm so boring though, I don't have a social life."

Hardly surprising; she's barely stopped since age six, when she kicked off her career, quickly becoming a CBBC mainstay in underage epics like The Demon Headmaster (trust me). Since then, she's flitted effortlessly between TV (recently Dr Who and, arguably her most recognisable role, cult character Vod in C4's painfully on point uni-comedy Fresh Meat), film (from gritty thriller Blitz to heart-wrenching docu-drama Dreams of a Life) and theatre (The Royal Court, the Globe, The National - she's walked London's best boards). She became London Poetry Slam champion at 17, had racked up writer credits for a string of highly praised plays before 25 (she's now 30), wrote and directed BBC short Happy Toys, has her own production company, Asylum Features, and has put her name to a bevy of worthy causes, notably a documentary on female genital mutilation, and working with Clean Break, who rehabilitate women through theatre.

So yeah, she's a bit tired. "I'm so on different time zones. I just flew straight from Boston to Manchester. I can feel it: I've got the shaky eye."

In Boston, she shot a pilot for Salem Witch Trial drama The Devil you Know - co-written by Orange is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan and directed by Gus Van Sant ("not a bad team"). It's a bit of a bucket list role: "There's not a huge amount of diversity in period drama in this country, so that felt like a big tick."

Then Manchester, to film the fourth and final series of Fresh Meat before the motley student family graduates. Will Zawe be sad to say goodbye? "So sad! I keep looking at this." She brings up her screensaver, a group shot of the cast. "Look at this gang! This is the closest I've got to being in something like My So-Called Life - one of those ensemble shows so of a time."

Her latest show, too, is strongly of its era. Not Safe for Work, a C4 comedy-drama centred on a group of civil servants relocated from London to Northampton after public sector cuts, airs this month. Zawe plays the reeling, recently divorced Katherine. "It's sex and work and relationships in the age of austerity. About cuts, but also about people cut adrift from their lives." And for Zawe, leaving Fresh Meat 's student bubble for the yuppie sphere, it's a natural next step: "A graduation."

Speaking of moving on - or, at least, moving - Zawe has just bought her first home. "I now own my first property. I feel like Super Mario at the end of level four: YES, I've finished stage four! But I've got no idea what stage five is..."

Still, she's not short of options. She's under commission for The National, and her second short film The Place We Go to Hide, part of the Corinthia's Artist in Residence series, just launched. Writing and directing the film, an atmospheric old romance-style piece on sleep, Zawe spent a month living in the hotel. "It was brilliant. Well, it went from brilliant to weird to brilliant. First you think, 'This is an 8 billion star hotel, I could live here', and then after a day in your room, all alone, you start to feel a bit Alan Partridge. A bit 'Don't look in that drawer!' But it was so helpful; those stages informed the film."

Next to acting, these disciplines are relatively new strings to Zawe's formidable bow. "Different stages in your life demand different things. You build up these experiences, which you channel into acting, until you think, 'I need to write this from my perspective now.' Directing is another facet of that: 'Now I need to control my ideas, see certain instincts through to the end.' It feels like a transitional moment, I don't know how they'll get on together."

But there's an even bigger bedfellow to contend with: Zawe is also writing her first book, a dramatisation of the industry, following in the short-story-cum-essay-style footsteps of Lena Dunham and hero Miranda July.

"It's not written as me. But it is about being a female actor - the parallels between being female, the societal roles handed to you, and the roles you play as an actor. Playing parts while dealing with life, drawing on your experiences to fulfil them.

"It's awesome - mostly because I'm the only person reading it - but hard. In an interview, if it comes out wrong, you can always say you've been misquoted. [Noted.] With writing, I very much committed that to page; that's my voice."

This voice is also very much part of a wider dialogue. "For women, there is an individual trajectory, but also a collective career. You're on your own path, but you feel your bigger contribution, aware of the wider movement."

It's this collective of talented voices that is making space for others. "There aren't enough complex female characters. One day everyone will be hip to the game, and each role will be as fully formed as the other. That's all we want. So we bloody write. Too bloody right!"

Too right indeed. And I'm not the only one who thinks so; it's all going down rather well. The accolades keep coming. Zawe seems to wander into them, slightly surprised at each success. She tells of being cast the week before, of winning competitions discovered the day of a deadline, almost wrong-footed by triumph.

"It's the equivalent of exam results. You're like, 'Break it to me, it's bad isn't it?' And then you've got three As. Any award or nomination creates this brilliant moment where you get to stop and think, 'Oh yeah, I was funny this year; I was in a comedy and people laughed. Awesome!' I'm such a 'Ooh, what's next?' person."

Case in point: "I was sitting in my living room the other day, looking at my walls, thinking, 'What colour shall I paint them?' I thought, 'This is a really cool moment.' Then I caught myself, sitting like I was at the start of a sprint. I thought, 'You really need to relax."

This might also explain her current favourite haunts. "I spend a lot of time at the Farrow & Ball shop, all of them, a lot of time at Leyland, Homebase. That's what all my conversations are about: splashbacks, tiling, all these new words... neutral spaces, beading, do you know what that is? This is beading, right here." She jabs the wall.

And when she's not cultivating her Elle Deco dream? There's film and theatre, naturally - her beloved Rio Cinema, a community theatre space out east - "And my mum and dad's. We hang out all the time now, I'm loving it. And my 94-year-old granddad. He's my style icon."

A model family girl, too? Of course. I'm veering into awe-overdrive. Maybe she is a witch.

I try to find some flaws in Zawe (still no rhyme). If there were any salacious gossip, it'd be off-record ("I'm doing that, 'I don't talk about my private life' thing - I talk way too much"), so that's out. She's a technophobe, if that's a flaw, a messy eater, apparently, and a bit crap on the red carpet: "It's embarrassing - I am not a naturally put together, poised person at all."

Not a lot to go on. How, then, do we run this terrible person out of town? Won't LA have her? They love overachievers.

"I'm a Londoner. When I go away, I can't wait to leave. But as soon as I get there, I just miss it. It's hard to put your finger on. Oh, London, I do love you, but what do I love about you? Like that point in a relationship: 'I just love you.' 'Which bits do you love? My smile? The way I walk into a room?' 'I don't know, babe, I just love all of you.'"

I am, in spite of myself, charmed. That's the thing about Zawe, just when you think your ego can't take any more of someone else's success, she goes all flippant and funny-like, compares herself to Marge Simpson, or admits she's off to Oxford Street to return a cagoule. It's disarming. Refreshing. On balance, I guess she can stay.

Not Safe for Work airs on C4 mid-May

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Introducing zawe ashton: actress, writer, amateur interior designer and all-rounder incarnate Zawe Ashton is what you might call a Renaissance Woman. A polymath, if you will. In the olden days we would have called her a witch. Or worse: a feminist icon.

# data[].attributes.body
Poety writing prompts, general resource

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Our friends at the Poetry School have again gathered together some writing prompts to inspire prize-winning poems.

All these prompts come from tutors and poets involved in delivering the various courses and activities offered the Poetry School. Courses are available in person or via CAMPUS, the Poetry School's online social network. CAMPUS membership is free and easy - pay them a visit and start joining in the poetry conversation. New students also get 15% off their first course. Book by phone to take advantage.

Meanwhile, we hope this following list of ideas sets your poetry brains ticking. And if you'd like to print them off, there's a pdf available, too.

Human / Nature

Think about an important, political, environmentally alert issue (there's not much which isn't these days!) that is important to you on a personal level. To do this you might choose the last petition you signed, or meant to sign, as a subject. Write a poem, that expresses its issues clearly and explicitly - however uncomfortable this feels! If you alight on a metaphor, then limit yourself to one that is a consistent strand throughout the poem.

Karen McCarthy Woolf from the Poetry School course 'Human / Nature'
mccarthywoolf.com | @KMcCarthyWoolf

Poetry Life Drawing

Organise your own poetry-life-drawing class. Ask a real life person to sit for you and make a poem about them in real time. They don't need to sit for hours, but make sure that you spend real time looking at that person and writing as you do so. You might want to get them doing some kind of activity themselves. Or maybe you want to pose them somehow, maybe with certain objects. You don't need to write the finished poem in the time they sit for you. You could simply begin to sketch notes and lines about what you see in front of you, and then finish the poem later.

Sarah Hesketh from the Poetry School course 'Poetry as Portraiture'
www.sarahhesketh.co.uk

Poetry and Parenthood

Choose a word - 'mother' or 'father.' What does that word mean to you? Mindstorm for five minutes - you might automatic write without letting your pen leave the page - and just pour out all the things the word makes you think of. Memories of parents (your own and other kids); adverts; fictional characters; images; associations. Think verbs or nouns you associate with the word (baking, the newspaper, darts, weepies, ironing, poohsticks); character-traits (reliable, stern); expectations. Write down scents or tastes or sounds you associate with your own mother or father or yourself as a mother or father. The poem will be called 'The Mother' or 'The Father'. Your notes will be the basis.

Clare Pollard from the Poetry School course 'The Poetry of Parenthood'
clarepollard.wordpress.com | @PoetClare

Prose Poems

Draft a prose poem that inhabits a moment from childhood, either real or fictional. If it's over 8 sentences, revise it down to that as a maximum. This should sharpen its focus. Next, do one of the following:
i) revise your poem into a single sentence, or
ii) revise your poem to make use of anaphora (repeating the beginnings of sentences).

Carrie Etter from the Poetry School course 'Advanced Prose Poetry'
carrieetter.com

'Dear' friend...

Write a poem titled 'Dear [x]', where x might = 'landlady', 'semolina', 'sea monsters', 'Donald Trump' - you get the idea. There should be some sort of edgy relationship between the speaker and the object of address; they can't actually be 'dear' in any simple sense.

Dai George from the Poetry School course 'Irony and Edge'
daigeorge.com/publications

Devastation

Remember or imagine a scene of cataclysm or devastation. You can research an historical event that you have found haunting. Put yourself into the scene as an observer and, making use of a catalogue or list, take stock of everything you see and hear. Extend your descriptions as fully as you can, and vary your syntax.

Liane Strauss from the Poetry School course 'Working with the Deep-breathing Line'

Poetry of Work

Write a poem which explores the ideas about work that you have grown up with. Think back to being a child - how did the adults around you show you what work is? You could choose a particular person in your family or your life to focus on. Consider how you have carried these lessons forward into your own life - either your working life or your creative life. One important thing to remember when writing about work is to make it rich in physical detail. This is especially important when we are writing about concepts that are hard to define, like love or work. Work, even when it is mental work, is a physical activity, and to make your poem really come to life, think about how you can describe the physical reality of work.

Kim Moore from the Poetry School course 'What Work Is'
kimmoorepoet.wordpress.com

Still stuck for ideas?

Even more writing inspiration...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our friends at the Poetry School have again gathered together some writing prompts to inspire prize-winning poems. All these prompts come from tutors and poets involved in delivering the various courses and activities offered the Poetry School. Courses are available in person or via CAMPUS, the Poetry School's online social network.

# data[].attributes.body
A list of writing, mentoring, publishing, community, and mental health resources that I pulled together at the end of the last Arkbound mentorship I ran - you may also find it useful

# data[].attributes.body
Poetry & Rap - differences and similarities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Is rap poetry? Is spoken word a different kind of rap?
If yes, how?
If no, why?

These question has been asked by many people over the years and in this article we hope to shed light on the differences and similarities between this three similar yet distant forms of human expressions and appreciation.

Is Rap Poetry?

To answer this befuddling query, I'll have to break down each word and action.

Usually on paper, poetry is the release of the emotions of the writer in forms and with instruments that pertains to poetry.

Instruments such as poetic devices, lines and stanzas, forms and so on.

You must have heard it in a lot of rap (hip-hop) movies that rap is just the combination of poetry and rhythm.

Well, that is true. (in some sense)

Original rap (the original hip-hop rap) was as a result of the drive people (youths) had to express themselves. This led to the beats, the rhymes, the poems, the artists - thus Hip Hop!.

Rap is a much more popular musical art that focuses on rhythm, rhymes and musicality.

Spoken Word Poetry

Spoken word is the oral performance of poetry.

It is usually performed in front of an audience or for an audience.

Prominent spoken word artists today include Rudy Fracisco, Andrea Gibson, Prince EA, Dike Chukwuemereji.

What are the differences between poetry, spoken word poetry and rap?

Connection and Differences Between Poetry and Rap

Rap just as poetry seems to have some features in common. Features such as the writing forms. Both works are usually written in verses (stanzas) which can be faceted.

They also both feature the use of rhythm in performances.
Whether you're reading a poem on a paper or listening or a rap song. If you observe close enough, you'll be able to note the flow of rhythm in them both.

Poems are read in meters, this is just as beats to rap. They help in organizing and delivering the messages intended by either performer or artist.

One other interesting connection between both is that many raps actually possess poetry in their lyrics.

Take some citing from Tupac's songs. All were hip-hop rap songs. Yet they all had various elements of poetry in them.

This could've been deeply influenced by the reality that Tupac was in fact a poet himself. A well-versed literate.

So another random pick, Eminem.
He is arguably the most popular rapper in the world for the last two decades.

Many of Eminem's raps includes poetic devices and even listeners can attest to his great use-of-words.

Here are some of his lines from Darkness '':

It's Like I'm Loading in Las Vegas - alliteration
The music is so loud that it's almost as though I don't hear no sound - antithesis/rhyme

You can also check out the relationship between an aubade (a poem; a song of lovers parting in the morning 6 am)'' and Ice-T's 6 'N The Mornin' ' (a rap music on police and gangsters).

Another interesting rap song with a lot of poetic exuberance is Notorious B.I.G's Juicy.

The song didn't achieve its extraordinary success just with the bars and rhymes it had. It did so with the upgrade Christopher (his real name) gave his verses.
In the song, he had poetic devices such as assonance, internal rhyme, allusion and alliteration included.

Take the close of the first verse in the song:

"Born sinner, the opposite of a winner
Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner
Peace to Ron G, Brucey B, Kid Capri
Funkmaster Flex, Lovebug Starsky"
Juicy by Notorious B.I.G

It comprises of alliteration, end rhyme, antithesis. Just some of the many devices he used in this masterpiece that'd slung his career to the top.

Juxtaposition, stanza breakage and a lot of other poetic devices are included in his rap music.

This proves then that poetry is a great tool for rap as well.

One other relativeness between the two forms is that poets quite find it easy to write rap music; but to perform it? That is another thing entirely.

But doesn't prove that poetry is rap or that every rapper is a poet, No.

The delivery of both forms makes them separate. Though poetry can be picked up and turned into rap (if it rhymes), most raps are not poetic at all and reading them is such an eye-sore.

Another disparity between both forms is the various forms which one possessed and the oneness of the other.
Poems can be in various forms: kelogbs, haikus, sonnets but rap is, oh well rap.

Connection and Differences Rap and Spoken Word

Often times people have been confused with these two; spoken word poetry and rap.

They even ask .... are spoken word artists rapping or is that some new type of reciting?

While rap focuses more on delivering the right rhythms and rhymes along with the message intended in a song or record, spoken word really is a free outlet to express oneself.

Spoken word is the (almost) lackadaisical form of poetry. Some even choose not to call is a form of poetry because of this.

It is not based on rhymes, although rhyming is possible when performing. One does not lose the message if one doesn't include rhyme.

The main focus of spoken word is usually the story being told through its rendition and not the amount of figurative expressions included in the performance.

The art form has its own unique finesse which makes both listening and performing spoken word a lovely experience.

Conclusion

Whether or not you see poetry as rap of rap as poetry, I am sure you agree that there are similarities between them just as there are differences.

Believable, their distinctions make them unique but also connected, in a way.

So for me, I may say rap is also poetry and you also may argue that it is not and we both could be right.

More resources you'd enjoy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Poetry and Rap; the Differences and Similarities Within - ArtHut

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Is rap poetry? Is spoken word a different kind of rap?If yes, how?If no, why? These question has been asked by many people over the years and in this article we hope to shed light on the differences and similarities between this three similar yet distant forms of human expressions and appreciation.

# data[].attributes.body
What Is Acrostic Poetry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Continuing on with the poetic forms available to poets, I have to discuss acrostic poetry. Acrostic poetry is very easy and fun. The most basic form spells words out on the left-hand side of the page using the first letter of each line.

I like to write
Acrostic poems
Mostly because
Reading them
Out loud is
Bound to be fun.

If you notice, the first letter of every line makes the simple sentence, "I am Rob." It's very simple, and you can make it as difficult as you want-where the fun part begins.

*****

Play with poetic forms!
Poetic forms are fun poetic games, and this digital guide collects more than 100 poetic forms, including more established poetic forms (like sestinas and sonnets) and newer invented forms (like golden shovels and fibs).

Click to continue.

*****

The brave at heart can even try double acrostics-that is, spelling things out using the first and last letter of each line.

MonkeyS
Yell and slaP
Lions tO
Offend micE
Visiting the eleganT
Elephant to heaR
It hide and crY.

In this silly example, I've spelled out "My love is poetry."

The acrostic is easy to do in its simplest form, but ambitious poets could write a whole paragraph or stories using acrostics if they had enough spare time. Or even write a double acrostic sonnet or sestina.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Continuing on with the poetic forms available to poets, I have to discuss acrostic poetry. Acrostic poetry is very easy and fun. The most basic form spells words out on the left-hand side of the page using the first letter of each line. I like to writeAcrostic poemsMostly becauseReading themOut loud isBound to be fun.

# data[].attributes.headline
Somnambulist Ballad by Federico Garci Lorca

# data[].attributes.subject
Somnambulist Ballad by Federico Garci Lorca