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Country Craft: Crafting a Legacy
By Stuart Phillips Recently, a writer called my work “honest and soulful.” That was touching, especially since I didn’t know he had read anything of mine. The realization that you never know who reads, and likes, your work reminded me of when I came home to Mississippi after my first hitch in the Army. One…
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Flexing My Creative Muscles: Playing the Ukulele, UAS, & 30-Day Challenges
By Melissa Llanes Brownlee I know. I know. The ukulele, right? How stereotypically Hawai’ian of me. Would you believe me if I told you that I had never owned an ukulele in my entire life until I moved to Japan? Well, it’s true. I bought a $50 (well 5000 yen) ukulele around 2010 from a…
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Altered Earths – Storyteller as Scientist: An Experiment in Four Variables
By S.E. Hartz I want to write this essay as a scientist would. I do not come with a conclusive thesis but with a working theory and a hypothesis to guide my investigation. The theory: things I have learned or explored in the laboratory and field can guide my fiction in new directions. The hypothesis:…
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TV Time: Learning About Narrative Structure from a Book to TV Adaptation
By Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez I spent the summer reading Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. I read a chapter or two every night for about three months with the intention of watching the novel’s TV adaptation immediately afterwards. The novel and subsequent TV show follow a Korean family living through Japanese rule in Korea, their immigration…
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How Should a Writer Be?: GOOD, HARD WORK
By Nick Rees Gardner My love for working class literature goes back to my preteen years when, over the summer, I rode with my dad to mid-Ohio car dealerships where we’d repair car interiors and windshield chips. We walked the hot asphalt and sweated. I listened to my dad trade stories with smarmy dealers and…
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Artful Academics: On Entering the Conversation
By Brandy Renee McCann I sat in the front row and waved my arm. I just couldn’t wait to share my opinion in class discussions. Hardly had another student began expressing themselves when my arm shot up with a half-baked reply. I had something to say and I wanted to say it as soon as…