by Joe Bunting |
I recently heard Horatio Spaford’s great song, “It is Well With My Soul”. I was moved, as I have been many times before. How is it that a song, a really old song, hasn’t gotten musty and useless over the years? Why do the words of others have the ability to touch our hearts so deeply?
Have you ever wondered how an author seems to be inside your head?
I looked up the story behind the song hoping to find some answers. And it turns out Spaford’s writing didn’t come out of a vacuum, but out of his own suffering. His experience can teach you how to powerfully connect your own suffering to the larger, human experience.
by Joe Bunting |
The Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as you probably know, was not awarded this year. The fiction panel nominated three books from a reading list of 300. (Can you imagine reading 300 books in a year?)
However, the Pulitzer board didn’t pick any of them. And we don’t know why. Were they not good enough? Were they not American enough? We don’t know. All we know is the Pulitzer Prize for fiction wasn’t awarded this year.
However, Michael Cunningham’s article on how the three Pulitzer nominees were chosen is a fascinating guide for how to angle for the Pulitzer.
If you want to win the Pulitzer, here’s how in five (not-so) easy steps…
by Joe Bunting |
Glimmer Train literary magazine is harder to get into than Harvard. In 2011, Harvard accepted 6.2 percent of applicants. Literary magazines like Glimmer Train often have acceptance rates of under one percent.
So when I asked Linda Swanson-Davies, who founded the journal with her sister in 1990, to chat with me about Glimmer Train and how to get published in literary magazines, I honestly wasn’t expecting her to say yes.
But she did!
I’m so excited to share our conversation with you. I hope it challenges you to consider submitting your work to literary magazines like Glimmer Train, and I hope it provides something of a salve to the soul if your story isn’t chosen. Mine certainly haven’t been!
Enjoy the interview.
by Joe Bunting |
Count me as one of those people who think that the unfortunately late Kurt Vonnegut is a modern reincarnation of Mark Twain. His books and short stories are littered with barbed, humorous, and wickedly honest advice about the process of writing. Perhaps my favorite piece of wisdom that he bestows is this: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
Of course, then he goes on to use one at the end of that same book, making the point that Rules only take us so far, even good rules. Without any further ado, my three favorite rules from Kurt Vonnegut. So it goes….
by Joe Bunting |
There’s a type of question I get every once in a while that always surprises me. Here are a few:
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that incorrect?
- Isn’t that a run-on sentence?
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that a fragment of a sentence?
- Isn’t that breaking the rules?
- Shouldn’t you fix your contractions? You don’t want to sound so informal, do you?
These questions surprised me because early on I learned that the best writers regularly break the rules. In fact, in every art form, from painting to sculpture to writing, one of the rules is to break the rules.
However, there is one dirty secret about breaking rules. I think it’s this secret that enables us to chide Stephenie Meyer and our eighth graders for not following the rules all while celebrating James Joyce for basically writing the book on rule breaking.
by Joe Bunting |
As I was riding across the steppes of Outer Mongolia (it hurt to sit down for a year afterwards), beneath horizons that appeared to be of limitless blue, I thought this was a country that called for an elemental style.
I’ve always loved Cormac McCarthy and amongst his many talents is the nature of his prose. “Clean and hard as pebbles,” says the Independent on Sunday; “language as subtly beautiful as its desert setting,” the Sunday Times. His style has been likened to The Old Testament and described as, “formidable,” “overpowering,” “transcendent.” To me his writing is beautiful and direct, naked and almost pagan in its connection to the landscape and base human nature.
