So, we all have favorite books. Me: Sabriel by Garth Nix and the Harry Potter series, hands down. But what about books that have shaped us as writers by modeling good form, beautiful sentence structure, or theme? There are several "writing" books that I've found helpful and chief among them are Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard, Upstream by Mary Oliver, The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell, and Three Genres: The Writing of Literary Prose, Poems, and Plays by Stephen Minot and Diane Thiel.
However, if I had to suggest one of those to anyone, it would be Upstream by Mary Oliver (although all of them are wonderful). Oliver writes these essays with the deftness of years spent honing her craft writing poetry. It is part memoir and part reverie. Quite simply: it is lovely.
Those books up there are just a few of the works that have helped me along my writing path. If we dive deeper into my book collection, we'd see that I have a penchant--developed early in life from reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lloyd Alexander--for science fiction and fantasy.
So, part one of the assignment for this week is to tell me about a book that helped form your ideas about writing or that makes you think "Wow, I wish I could write like that."
Part two: Do some research and find three literary journals that you think would be a good fit for your poetry. A good place to look is Submittable. If you don't have an account yet, sign up! Look through all the journals and look into the process of submitting. You don't have to submit anything at this point; we're saving that for later in the semester once we've workshopped some of your poems.
Also, I took a look at your blog! I noticed that you like to rhyme. I like how you list three songs at the beginning and end of your posts to get readers into your current mindset. Very cool. Alright, now off to work!
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However, if I had to suggest one of those to anyone, it would be Upstream by Mary Oliver (although all of them are wonderful). Oliver writes these essays with the deftness of years spent honing her craft writing poetry. It is part memoir and part reverie. Quite simply: it is lovely.
Those books up there are just a few of the works that have helped me along my writing path. If we dive deeper into my book collection, we'd see that I have a penchant--developed early in life from reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lloyd Alexander--for science fiction and fantasy.
So, part one of the assignment for this week is to tell me about a book that helped form your ideas about writing or that makes you think "Wow, I wish I could write like that."
Part two: Do some research and find three literary journals that you think would be a good fit for your poetry. A good place to look is Submittable. If you don't have an account yet, sign up! Look through all the journals and look into the process of submitting. You don't have to submit anything at this point; we're saving that for later in the semester once we've workshopped some of your poems.
Also, I took a look at your blog! I noticed that you like to rhyme. I like how you list three songs at the beginning and end of your posts to get readers into your current mindset. Very cool. Alright, now off to work!
Before I tell you my list of books that inspired me, I want to say at that at the time I read these books I was not that serious about reading a lot about the genres I am interested in. I was just trying to read something at least. Now that I am serious about reading meaningful books that is going to help my craft. I do want to read more sophisticated literature books.
ReplyDeleteMy list of two literature books are the Dream Keeper and Other Poems by Langston Hughes and the second one is Black Boy by Richard Wright. I also haven't read these books in a while. Here is the six books that inspired me to write, but they are not credible sources. These books come from Amazon and they are by amateur writers, but the subjects that are discussed in these books is what inspired me to write the way that I do. These books are: Double Pleasure, Double Pain by Nikki Rashan, The Replacement Man by Christiana Harrell, Wounded by Ben Burgess Jr., In the Pursuit of Joi by Olivia Renee Wallace, Foolish Pursuits by Olivia Renee Wallace, and The Day the Streets Stood Still by Jaquavis Coleman.
I looked around a lot of literary journals. For a minute, I lost hope that I would find some journals that I would be interested in and that they might like my work, but I think I found three. They are Cathexis Northwest Press, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Outcast. I found some more, but those were the ones that I really liked. I also want to say that I love the Submittable website. It was so cool. I enjoyed researching journals and I am so excited to submit some of my work and for us to workshop some of my poems.
I'm glad that you liked the songs that I posted at the beginning and the end of my post on my blog. I did that so people could know what type of music I like as well as to keep the readers in my current mindset. I'm glad that you caught on to that. Yes, I do love to rhyme. Before I became a poet, I was a rapper and once I became a poet rhyming always stayed with me. I guess it's my signature. One thing I want to do it to use my rhyming as a skill that can strengthen my poetry, but I don't want to rhyme so much that my readers get annoyed with it or I would like to still rhyme,but rhyme with different lines, but not to the point my readers are annoyed with it because they are expecting it because that's all I do is rhyme.