Over, Under, Through, Around: Narrative in Creative Nonfiction
“Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilizers.” ― A.S. Byatt Sitting on a hard plastic chair in a windowless classroom below the Osborne Center on my college campus, I watched as my creative writing professor went around the…
An Editor’s Tips on Submitting to Literary Journals
So you want to submit to a literary journal. You have a short story, or some poems, or a flashy nonfiction piece that you’re convinced is a sure-fire piece that editors all over the interwebs will be fighting with each…
Are You a Pantser or a Planner?
When I was new to writing, I often didn’t know what I was doing. I spent the valuable (and few) minutes I had every day to devote to writing just floating around in a sea of words. There was often…
What Makes a Good Poem?
When you think of poetry, your mind might go to the classics. Perhaps to Homer’s The Odyssey or to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales — both epic stories told in meter and reflected in the tropes of modern storytelling still used today. Or maybe when you…
Falling Behind in Writing and…Life
A stream of consciousness post… Some days it feels like it takes all I can do to not fall behind on everything. It’s hard enough to go through the day to day–work, food, pets, bills, exercise, grocery shopping, errand running,…
Finding the Time to Write (or Not Write)
Something interesting that I have found about writing is how much I learn about it when I’m not writing. It may sound counter-intuitive, but I almost always find this to be the case. Over the summer I was writing nonstop. …
Finding Your Writing Tribe
It’s always amazing to me how spending time with other writers, and learning more about writing, can leave me so incredibly invigorated. This past weekend, I, along with some of the other borrowed solace editors, attended the Pikes Peak Writer’s Conference (PPWC). …
It’s Hard to Find Yourself in the Midst of Life
I am a firm believer in talking about what’s hard. I think it is a disservice to everyone if we ignore what makes us uncomfortable or ashamed. There are things I believe that are hard things to believe, and I…
Growth Isn’t Always Easy
I, like most people, went through several growth spurts during middle school. For most of my life I’ve been taller than the majority of kids my age, so these spurts were unwelcome. I was more mature than many my age,…
The Life of a Writer is a Life of Rejection
This is a post I never published from spring 2017, yet is particularly poignant after a slew of another type of rejections recently… I’ve been meaning to write something about rejection for a while. The thing is, I find this…
Addey Vaters
Web page of writer, editor, and all around grand human being.
