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Scrivener Creative Review is open for submissions for their annual print journal. Looking for prose, poetry, art/photography, and reviews. Submit prose and book reviews (2500 words max.) and up to six poems. Deadline: March 7, 2016.

The Wax Paper, a literary and arts journal printed as a newsprint broadsheet, is accepting submissions of all forms of written word, image, and collected conversation. Advice to writers: Read the publication’s manifesto. Deadline: June 30, 2016.

Hi all, Julie here!

Recently I found myself looking out a hotel room window at a cityscape. The view made me think of the components of a city—streets made up of buildings, buildings made up of walls, walls made up of bricks.

I found myself thinking of all the unnoticed bricks that were holding up the city below my window.

This observation got me thinking about novels. I started considering all the components of a novel—chapters made up of scenes, scenes made up of paragraphs, paragraphs made up of sentences, sentences made up of words.

This whole metaphor gave me the idea for a series on the building blocks of a novel. This post will be on words—the most basic building block. The next will be about sentences, then paragraphs, then scenes, then chapters. Of course, most things as intricate as a novel are greater than the sum of their parts, so maybe the final post in the series will be about how a novel transcends (or hopes to transcend) all these things that go into it.

Starting with words.

Word choice is one of the most fundamental aspects of writing, so much so that we don’t talk about it much. But the wrong word can leave writing flat or confusing, and more importantly, the right word can make writing come alive on the page.

There are so many ways in which word choice impacts a piece of writing! Since we’re talking about novels, I want to focus on clarity, voice, and sound.

Clarity

One of the most powerful things about word choice is the subtle change in meaning that can happen when a writer changes just one word. Consider the differences between the following:

“She dropped the package to the ground.”

“She chucked the package to the ground.”

“She hurled the package to the ground.”

Swap package with bundle and ground with pavement and the meaning changes even more. Consider the difference between “She dropped the package to the ground,” and “She hurled the bundle to the pavement.”

This is a painfully simple example, and the lesson here is so basic and elementary, it’s easy to assume this is something we all know how to do and dive into what we perceive as more “advanced” methods of improving our writing. But all the symbolism and metaphors and motifs in the world won’t rescue a sentence from the wrong words. Without clarity, our meaning is lost. We can all think of at least one book we’ve read that felt muddled and murky. Just as you wouldn’t want to watch a movie that was shot through a blurry lens, you wouldn’t want to read an out-of-focus story. Word choice instills meaning and tone, and without intentional language those things suffer.

Voice

Word choice has a huge impact on that elusive aspect of writing we call voice. There are many ways to define voice, but for this post, I’ll turn to something Kat Zhang wrote in a fabulous post on the subject for this blog:

“Voice is, I think, the way a story is told. Just as how the same piece of music sounds quite different if played on a violin versus a flute (or sung by a choir or a rapper), a story that involves that same plot, characters, world, etc, can still change a lot depending on the voice used to tell it.”

By carefully selecting the right words, a writer can alter the voice of a story from tense to sarcastic to poetic. I often turn to The Catcher in the Rye when I need an example of a story told with a distinct and unmistakable voice. Imagine how word choice would affect the voice of just the first line:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

~ JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.

If Salinger had changed just a few words—substituting painful for lousy and stuff for crap, for instance, the voice would have been significantly altered.

This example also demonstrates how strongly word choice impacts characterization, especially in a first person narrative. But even in third person, word choice will help or hinder characterization. If I write, “The family always dined at six,” your idea of the characters will be different than if I write, “The family always ate at six,” or “The family always broke bread at six.”

Rhythm and Sound

I’ve written about adding sound to your prose on the blog before, but I want to mention it here because sound ties in to any discussion of word choice. Comedy illustrates this beautifully. Think of Bill Murray’s line in the movie Stripes: “That’s the fact Jack!” So much of that comedic moment relies on the sound and rhythm of the words. Comedian Brian Regan has a whole bit about forgetting to do a project for science when he was in the sixth grade and handing in a “cup o’ dirt.” The entire joke depends on the staccato sound of the words. If Regan had said he handed in a “container of soil,” the joke would lose all of its impact. Of course, the importance of choosing words for their sound and rhythm applies to all writing, not just comedy. If you can think of a book that received praise for its lyrical prose or its taut tension, you can be sure it contains excellent examples of words carefully chosen for their sound.

Returning to our metaphor of a city, the words you choose for your novel really are comparable to the bricks used by the builder. When bricks are well chosen and do their job, they go unnoticed. They hold everything in place and create beauty and function. The words you choose will do the same. The right words will hold up the structure of your novel and give it style without calling attention to themselves.

What are your thoughts on word choice? Do you have any advice to add? Please share your ideas in the comments!

Quilt of Life, a new bi-weekly blog invites submissions about mentoring, foster care, and adoption. Welcomes prose (1000–2500 words) poetry (up to five), photography, and art. Deadline: Rolling. Guidelines.

University of Windsor’s Generation Magazine is accepting poetry, prose and creative non-fiction from Canadian graduate and undergraduate students. Submit up to 5 double-spaced pages. Payment: Two copies of the magazine and $2 per published piece. Email to [email protected]. Deadline: December 1, 2015.

Green Blotter Magazine is looking for visual art, poetry, and prose from current undergraduates. Open to any genres or experiments with the visual and verse. Accepted pieces included in Green Blotter’s 2016 issue. Deadline: February 1, 2016. Guidelines.

Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton
Written & Illustrated by Don Tate
Peachtree Publishers      9/01/2015
978-1-56145-825-7
32 pages       Age 4—8

“GEORGE LOVED WORDS. But George was enslaved. Forced to work long hours, he wqas unable to attend school or learn how to read. GEORGE WAS DETERMINED. He listened to the white children’s lessons and learned the alphabet. Then he taught himself to read. He read everything he could find. GEORGE LIKED POETRY BEST. While he tended his master’s cattle, he composed verses in his head. He recited his poems as he sold the fruits and vegetables on a nearby college campus. News of the slave poet traveled quickly among the students. Soon, George had customers for his poems. But George was still enslaved. Would he ever be free?” [inside jacket]

Review
Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton is indeed remarkable. Author and artist, Don Tate, has written an amazing story which he illustrated—with gouache, archival ink, and pencil—beautiful scenes of Chapel Hill, North Caroline, circa mid-1800’s. George Moses Horton is a real person. Young George’s desire to read and write were so strong that he listened in on the white children’s lessons while working long hours for his master. With diligence and hard work, George mastered the alphabet and learned to read and then write. He loved the inspirational prose he found in the Bible and his mother’s hymnal, but most of all, George loved poetry. He wrote poems while working those long hours in the field, but without paper or pen, he had to commit each poem to memory.

At age 17, George and his family were split up and George was given to the master’s son. George found the silver lining in his situation while selling fruit on the University of North Carolina’s campus(where he was teased by students). George distracted himself from his tormentors by reciting his poetry. It was not long before George was selling his poetry, sometimes for money—25c—other times for fine clothes and fancy shoes. A professor’s wife helped George put his poetry onto paper and get it published in newspapers, making him the first African-American to be published. George often wrote about slavery and some poems protested slavery, which made his work extremely dangerous in southern states—some states actually outlawed slavery poems, no matter the author’s skin color. The end of the Civil War officially made George a free man, yet his love of words and poetry had given George freedom since he learned to read,

“George’s love of words had taken him on great a journey. Words made him strong. Words allowed him to dream. Words loosened the chains of bondage long before his last day as a slave.”

Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton is one of those “hidden” gems the textbooks forget about, but history should not. Tate’s picture book portrays George’s life with the grim realities of the era, yet there are moments of hope when the sun literally shines upon a spread. This is more than a book about slavery or the Civil War. Those things are important, because they are the backdrop to George’s life, but Tate makes sure the positives in George’s life shine through, making the story motivational and awe-inspiring.

Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton is about following your dreams and then taking your dream and yourself as far as you can go, never giving up on yourself, regardless of negative influences. For those who dream of a better life, especially writers and poets, George Moses Horton’s story makes it clear that the only thing that can truly get in your way is yourself. Schools need to get this book into classrooms. Stories such as George Moses Horton’s should be taught right along with the stories American history textbooks do cover.

POET: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF GEORGE MOSES HORTON. Text and illustrations (C) 2015 by Don Tate. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Peachtree Publishers, Atlanta, GA.

Buy Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton at Amazon—Book Depository—IndieBound Books—Peachtree Publishers.

Learn more about Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton HERE.
Find a Teacher’s Guide HERE.

Meet the author/illustrator, Don Tate, at his website:  http://dontate.com/
Find more picture books at the Peachtree Publishers’ website:  http://peachtree-online.com/

AWARDS
A Junior Library Guild Selection, Fall 2015
Kirkus, STARRED REVIEW
School Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

Also by Don Tate
The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch
It Jes’ Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw
Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite
Hope’s Gift
She Loved Baseball
. . . and many more

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Copyright © 2015 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews. All Rights Reserved

.Full Disclosure: Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton by Don Tate, and received from Peachtree Publishers, is in exchange NOT for a positive review, but for an HONEST review. The opinions expressed are my own and no one else’s. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Hi All,

Children’s picture book Samuel T. Moore of Corte Magore (written in rhyme) tells the adventurous story of Sam, a tenacious land and sea fiddler crab (complete with fiddle and bow) who finds himself on the sandy shores of an idyllic island named Corte Magore. This book teaches children about courage and tenacity; to stand up to bullying; and to fight for that they believe in, while also teaching them about the concept of “home” – all told in one big epic poem. This book is geared towards children ages 3-7.

As promised, here are compelling reasons this book should be in your school’s library:

The book is written in rhyme:
Rhyming verse aids in early-development learning and recall.

By playing with the short texts of rhymes, children explore the mechanics of the English language. They find out how language works and become familiar with the relationship between the 44 sounds of English and the 26 alphabet letters – information which helps them when they begin reading to decode the sounds that make up words. The value of this type of language-play with rhymes in early learning is both underestimated and undervalued.

The book utilizes many different poetic devices that can be difficult to teach like alliteration, point-of-view, stanza, meter, reputation, assonance, personification, and my personal favorite, Onomatopoeia, which utilizes words which imitate sound.. Poetic devices are used to take the reader to a different time or place and helps with imagery.

Poetry can follow a strict structure, or none at all, but many different types of poems use poetic devices. Poetic devices are tools that a poet can use to create rhythm, enhance a poem’s meaning, or intensify a mood or feeling. These devices help piece the poem together, much like a hammer and nails join planks of wood together.

Authors like Seuss and Silverstein paved the way for poetry in children’s literature, yet it’s hard to find new children’s books today written in prose. Carol Hurst at http://www.Booksintheclassroom.com intimates why it’s best to not let this great art die.

…along came Shel Silverstein (Shel Silverstein’s website). He wrote poems about picking your nose and selling your baby sister and adults (some of them) winced and kids guffawed and kids’ poetry was changed forever. Now we’ve got the gamut of emotions and subjects in kids poetry. Poetry, of course, be it for child or adult (and the distinction is not always clear) is very much a matter of perception. Poems speak to the individual, even more than stories do, and some are not speaking to you — at least not right now. The rules of poetry selection are the same as for the selection of any kind of literary material that you’re going to use with your kids. It must speak to you as the living breathing adult you are before you can help it speak to kids. If it’s supposed to be funny, it should make you laugh or at least smile. If it’s supposed to be sad, it should choke you up a bit. If it’s a description of a thing or a feeling, it should help you see it or feel it in a new way.
So, which of all the books of poetry will you choose for your classroom? Every one you can afford.

And, that’s all just a start. Tomorrow, you can expect to see me add to my list. Rather than saving this post as a draft, I think I’ll go ahead and publish it now.

As always, thanks for the ear!

Tonia

I recently stumbled across the works of Australian poet C. J. Dennis (1876 – 1938) and have been enjoying his poetry and writing from The C.J. Dennis Collection – from his forgotten writings edited by Garrie Hutchinson. You may have come across his most well known work, a humorous verse novel called The Songs of […]

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Lost for Words

by Natalie Russell

Peachtree Publishers    3/01/2014

978-1-56145-739-7

Age 4 to 8  32 pages

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“Tapir and his friends all have nice new notebooks, just waiting to be filled. Giraffe decides to write a poem, Hippo writes a story, and Flamingo composes a beautiful song. But poor Tapir can’t think of anything to write – and the harder he tries the more upset he becomes! But everything starts to change when Tapir stops trying to write and begins to draw… this gentle story will inspire even the littlest artists to find their creative sparks.”

Opening

“Tapir had some pencils and a nice new notebook. But he didn’t know what to write.”

The Story

Tapir and his friends all have new notebooks and pencils. Giraffe, Hippo, and Flamingo all easily fill their notebooks with poems, stories, and songs. Tapir is stuck. He is having classic writer’s block. Nothing would come to mind. Tapir thought he must doing something wrong. He imitated his friends. First, Tapir tried humming but no words came. He tried chewing on nice green leaves off the tree, but all that came was a grumpy feeling. Finally, Tapir tried wallowing in the mud. Nothing. Tapir’s friends told him not to worry something would come to him. Poor Tapir didn’t think so. He walked away, way up to the top of the hill, where he could see everything and everything was so beautiful. No words came.

Review

For anyone who has ever had writer’s block, this is the picture book for you. Poor Tapir could not think of anything to write. Giraffe is writing poetry, Flamingo composes a song, and Hippo writes a story, but Tapir could not think of anything to write. Words would not come for Tapir. He tried so hard to force words to flow. Tapir tried copying his friend’s methods—humming, eating leaves, wallowing in mud, but they didn’t work because Tapir’s mind works Tapir’s way.

I love that Tapir wandered off somewhere quiet where all he had was his own resources. Then he simply looked around and inspiration hit. Words still did not come to Tapir, because he did not need words to express himself. Tapir needs pictures. When he was lost for words, Tapir tried to be like his friends when all he needed was to be true to himself. What a great message.

The beautiful illustrations are in lighter shades of blues, greens, and yellows, with orange and a little brown thrown in. Author/illustrator Natalie Russell’s spreads are screen prints, not charcoal, pencils, or digitally made with Illustrator or Photoshop. Even drawn creativity can be many different styles, just as writing can be many different forms and genres. It is good to remember Hippo’s process of writing stories will not be Tapir’s way of creating pictures. A gentle push—a walk up a hill—might work, but creativity cannot forced.

Lost for Words will entertain young children and might spark their imaginations. The story of these four friends and the different ways they filled their notebooks is itself creative. After reading Lost for Words several times—or maybe just once—young children will be asking for a notebook of their own. Some will find words and write a poem or a story, or maybe a song. Others will draw pictures to express themselves. If Lost for Words encourages creativity, it has been a success.

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Learn more about Lost for Words HERE.

Buy your own copy of Lost for Words at Amazon—B&N—Peachtree—your local bookstore.

Meet the author / illustrator, Natalie Russell at her website:  http://www.natalierussell.co.uk/

Find more great Peachtree books at their website:  http://peachtree-online.com/

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LOST FOR WORDS. Text and illustrations copyright © 2014 by Natalie Russell. Reproduce by permission of the publisher, Peachtree Publishers, Atlanta, GA.

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Other Spring 12014 Releases from Peachtree

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The Grudge Keeper   4/01/2014

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Charlie Bumpers vs. the Really Nice Gnome  4/012014

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Claude at the Beach   4/01/2014

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Peachtree Book Blog Tour

Lost for Words

Monday, 3/10/14
Sally’s Bookshelf

Tuesday, 3/11/14
It’s About Time Mamaw

Wednesday, 3/12/14
Chat with Vera

A Word’s Worth

Thursday, 3/13/14

Tolivers to Texas

Kid Lit Reviews

Friday, 3/14/14
Geo Librarian

Next Peachtree Book Blog Tour: ABOUT HABITATS: FORESTS, starting Monday, March 17th

Does every writer, regardless of genre, have an urge to dabble in poetry? Does the ebb and flow of syllabic rhythm entice the essayist to pay more attention to the lyricism of her own work? Is there a true difference between the cadence of a lovely line of poetry and a well-crafted sentence that leads the reader into the first paragraph of a novel?

Brooks Landon, non-fiction writer and professor at the University of Iowa, believes that all writing can benefit from understanding how sentences operate. He says:

“Sentences are shaped by specific context and driven by specific purpose, so no rules or mechanical protocols can prepare us for the infinite number of tasks our sentences must accomplish.”

By the time I got through half of his course, I understood his meaning. I could no longer look at something written and see only the story that the words conveyed. Suddenly I noticed the length of sentences, the patterns used in assembling them, and the syntax of each segment comprising them.

I also understood that poetry, for all of its forms and eccentricities, was no different from prose in its syntax and overall structure. I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago, I wrote a small piece of creative non-fiction for specific audience. I then translated that piece into poetry, just to see if the piece suffered any ill-effects. You tell me whether I succeeded in making both versions work.

The creative non-fiction piece goes like this:

THE MOONLIGHT DANCE

Moonlight flows across the lawn’s clear center, chasing larger shadows and forming a stage with spotlight. Rustling sounds emerge from the right, loud enough to grab the attention of a watcher. Into the spotlight amble four ebony bodies. Each sports a broad white stripe.

The largest of the troupe leads the single line of dancers into position. They pause. Noses rise to sniff the cool night air. Tongues flick in and out to taste that same air.

Faint chattering escapes young throats.

Chorus dancers, small and new, follow the lead of the diva, their mother. One faint command releases them for movement. Slow revolutions begin counter-clockwise.

One. Two. Three. The line pauses.

Each nose rises to sniff the air. Tongues flick out to taste. Another faint command comes from the leader.

Again they move.

The diva pivots in place to face the line. Each small dancer echoes the movement. Slow revolutions clockwise.

One. Two. Three. The line pauses.

The command voice changes to a more enticing note. The ritual is repeated by the troupe. Counter-clockwise followed by clockwise. After three full ritual dances, the troupe stops as precisely as it began.

A low crooning issues from the diva to her dancers, and they amble off into the shadows to disappear into the night. The watcher stands entranced and questioning. Why did they dance? Had anyone else ever seen such skunk behavior?

The poetic form came out as follows:

MOONLIGH

Does every writer, regardless of genre, have an urge to dabble in poetry? Does the ebb and flow of syllabic rhythm entice the essayist to pay more attention to the lyricism of her own work? Is there a true difference between the cadence of a lovely line of poetry and a well-crafted sentence that leads the reader into the first paragraph of a novel?

Brooks Landon, non-fiction writer and professor at the University of Iowa, believes that all writing can benefit from understanding how sentences operate. He says:

“Sentences are shaped by specific context and driven by specific purpose, so no rules or mechanical protocols can prepare us for the infinite number of tasks our sentences must accomplish.”

By the time I got through half of his course, I understood his meaning. I could no longer look at something written and see only the story that the words conveyed. Suddenly I noticed the length of sentences, the patterns used in assembling them, and the syntax of each segment comprising them.

I also understood that poetry, for all of its forms and eccentricities, was no different from prose in its syntax and overall structure. I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago, I wrote a small piece of creative non-fiction for specific audience. I then translated that piece into poetry, just to see if the piece suffered any ill-effects. You tell me whether I succeeded in making both versions work.

The creative non-fiction piece goes like this:

THE MOONLIGHT DANCE

Moonlight flows across the lawn’s clear center, chasing larger shadows and forming a stage with spotlight. Rustling sounds emerge from the right, loud enough to grab the attention of a watcher. Into the spotlight amble four ebony bodies. Each sports a broad white stripe.

The largest of the troupe leads the single line of dancers into position. They pause. Noses rise to sniff the cool night air. Tongues flick in and out to taste that same air.

Faint chattering escapes young throats.

Chorus dancers, small and new, follow the lead of the diva, their mother. One faint command releases them for movement. Slow revolutions begin counter-clockwise.

One. Two. Three. The line pauses.

Each nose rises to sniff the air. Tongues flick out to taste. Another faint command comes from the leader.

Again they move.

The diva pivots in place to face the line. Each small dancer echoes the movement. Slow revolutions clockwise.

One. Two. Three. The line pauses.

The command voice changes to a more enticing note. The ritual is repeated by the troupe. Counter-clockwise followed by clockwise. After three full ritual dances, the troupe stops as precisely as it began.

A low crooning issues from the diva to her dancers, and they amble off into the shadows to disappear into the night. The watcher stands entranced and questioning. Why did they dance? Had anyone else ever seen such skunk behavior?

The poetic form came out as follows:

MOONLIGH

By Helen Small Pathological lying, the philosopher Sissela Bok tells us, ‘is to all the rest of lying what kleptomania is to stealing’. In its most extreme form, the liar (or ‘pseudologue’) ‘tells involved stories about life circumstances, both present and past’.

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By John Sutherland

We can never know the Victorians as well as they knew themselves. Nor–however well we annotate our texts–can we read Victorian novels as responsively as Victorians read them. They, not we, own their fiction. Thackeray and his original readers shared a common ground so familiar that there was no need for it to be spelled out. The challenge for the modern reader is to reconstruct that background as fully as we can. To ‘Victorianize’ ourselves, one might say.

It goes beyond stripping out the furniture of everyday life (horses not motorised transport, no running hot water, rampant infectious diseases) into attitudes. Can we—to take one troublesome example—in reading, say, Vanity Fair, ‘Victorianize’ our contemporary feelings about race? Or should we accept the jolt that overt 19^th-century racism gives the modern reader, take it on board, and analyse what lies behind it?

It crops up in the very opening pages of Vanity Fair. Thackeray’s first full-page illustration in the novel shows the coach carrying Amelia and Becky (she hurling her Johnson’s ‘Dixonary’ out of the window) from Miss Pinkerton’s to the freedom of Russell Square. Free, free at last. Looked at closely, we may also note a black footman riding postilion in the Sedley coach. He is, we later learn, called Sambo. He features a couple of times in the first numbers and his presence hints, obliquely, that the slave trade is one field of business that the two rich merchants, Mr Sedley and Mr Osborne, may have made money from. The trade was, of course, abolished by Wilberforce’s act in 1805, but slaves continued to work in the British West Indies on the sugar plantations until the 1830s. The opening chapters of Vanity Fair are set in 1813.

When we first encounter George Osborne and Dobbin, they are just back from the West Indies. What was their regiment doing? Protecting the British interest in sugar cane production in the Caribbean possessions of the Crown (it is, incidentally, the same crop which enriches Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre and the Bertram family in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park; the English were addicted to sugar in their tea and cakes).

There is another character in the novel with an interest in the West Indies. Amelia’s and Becky’s schoolmate at Miss Pinkerton’s academy, Miss Swartz, is introduced as the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitt’s.’ St. Kitt’s, one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean, had (until well into the twentieth century) a monoculture economy based on one crop, sugar. The plantations were worked, until the mid-1830s, by slaves–of whom Miss Swartz’s mother must have been one. Dobbin’s and George’s regiment, the ‘—-th,’ has recently been garrisoned at St. Kitts just before we encounter them. One of their duties would be to put down the occasional slave rebellions.

Miss Swartz is, we deduce, the daughter of a sugar merchant (the name hints at Jewish paternity) who has consoled himself with a black concubine. This was normal practice. It was also something painfully familiar to Thackeray. His father had been a high-ranking official in the East India Company. Thackeray, we recall, was born in Calcutta and educated himself on money earned in India. Before marrying, Thackeray’s father, as was normal, had a ‘native’ mistress and by her an illegitimate daughter, Sarah Blechynden. It was an embarrassment to the novelist, who declined any relationship with his half-sister in later life. In the truly hideous depiction Thackeray made of Miss Swartz (he illustrated his fiction, of course) in chapter 21 (‘Miss Swartz Rehearsing for the Drawing-Room’) one may suspect spite and an element of sham

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This past weekend saw Oxford’s annual Alice’s Day take place, featuring lots of Alice in Wonderland themed events and exhibitions. With that in mind, today we bring you two videos of Simon Winchester talking about Charles Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll) and both his love of photography and his relationship with Alice Liddell and her family. You can read an excerpt from his book, The Alice Behind Wonderland, here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Simon Winchester is the author of the bestselling books The Surgeon of Crowthorne, The Meaning of Everything, The Map that Changed the World, Krakatoa, Atlantic, and The Man Who Loved China. In recognition of his accomplished body of work, he was awarded the OBE in 2006. He lives in Massachusettes and in the Western Isles of Scotland.

View more about this book on the

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By Dennis Baron

There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it.

According to the Guardian, growing numbers of “authors” are churning out meaningless ebooks by harvesting sections of text from the web, licensing it for a small fee from online rights aggregators, or copying it for free from an open source like Project Gutenberg. These authors—we could call them text engineers—contribute nothing to the writing process beyond selecting passages to copy and stringing them together, or if that seems too much like work, just cutting out the original author’s name and pasting in their own. The spam ebooks that result are composed entirely of prose designed, not to convey information or send a message, but to churn profits.

The other new source of empty text is content farms, internet sweatshops where part-timers generate prose whose sole purpose is to use keywords that attract the attention of search engines. The goal of content farms is not to get relevant text in front of you, but to get you to view the paid advertising in which the otherwise meaningless words are nested.

Ebook spam and content farms may sound like the antitheses of traditional writing, in that they don’t inform, stimulate thought, or comment on the human condition. They’re certainly not the kind of repurposed writing that Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly foresaw back in 2006 when he wrote that we’d soon be doing with online prose what we were already doing with music: sampling, copying, remixing, and mashing up other people’s words to create our own personal textual playlists.

Kelly, who was paid for his essay, also predicted that in the brave new world of digital text the value we once assigned to words would shift to links, tags, and annotations, and that authors, no longer be paid for producing content, would once again become amateurs motivated by the burning need to share, as they now do with such abandon on Facebook and Twitter.

But if we mash up Kelly’s futuristic vision with the harsh reality that strings of keywords may bring in more dollars than connected prose, then it’s possible that tomorrow’s writers won’t be bloggers, Tweeters, or even taggers, they’ll be scrapbookers, motivated by the burning need to cut and paste. The web may be making authors of us all, but the growing number of content-free links threatens to put writing as we know it out of business.

A cynic might argue that far too many writers have already mastered the art of saying absolutely nothing, so we shouldn’t be surprised if our feverish quest to capitalize on the internet, combined with the vast expansion of the author pool that the net makes possible, have created the monster of contentless prose. We get the writing we deserve.

Plus, things online having the attraction that they do, instead of damning these new genres, soon we may be teaching students how to master them. After all, no writing course is considered complete without a unit on how to write effective email. So it won’t be long before some start-up offers a course in text-mashing instaprose. Or an

YA for Dummies and Prairie Storms

What sounds does a ground hog make? An earless lizard? A burrowing owl? Six months ago, I had no idea!

August, 2011 Release

Written by Deborah Halverson, founder of the writer’s advice website DearEditor.com, it has great advice on writing and publishing a teen novel. Deborah edited young adult and children’s fiction with Harcourt Children’s Books before picking up a pen to write the award-winning teen novels Honk If You Hate Me and Big Mouth.

The book is filled with great features, including:

• tips for targeting an audience, finding an angle that’ll make the story stand out, and writing a killer hook
• an extensive chapter on self-marketing to help writers move boldly into the realm of self-promotion–including book trailers
• techniques and exercises to shape plot, create teen-friendly characters, develop a convincingly youthful voice, write natural dialogue, and use setting to illuminate characters and plot
• 13 National Book Award winners and finalists, Newbery medalists and honorees, and other award-winning luminaries sharing their insights
• self-editing tools to transform a first draft into a strong submission-ready final draft
• insider tips for finding the right agent and/or editor and preparing a stand-out submission package
• answers to common book contract questions
• advice on self-publishing for YA writers

Read more at DearEditor.com

Finding Audio for a Book Trailer

To anticipate the release of Prairie Storms and celebrate the release of Writing Young Adult Fiction for Dummies, I’m debuting the Prairie Storms book trailer here today.

As the author of The Book Trailer Manual, I had some simple ideas on where to find public domain sounds and inexpensive audio tracks.

Sound Track. First, I knew that I wanted a sound track to back up the

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On a summer’s day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church, Oxford, Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding Camera, recently purchased in London. In The Alice Behind Wonderland, Simon Winchester uses the resulting image as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of literature. In the short excerpt from the book, below, Winchester writes about the pictures of children he took in the years before he photographed Alice Liddell. 

Portraiture was what most interested Dodgson, and one assumes he began making images of people from the moment his skills had developed enough to allow him to assert his independence from [his friend and fellow photographer, Reginald] Southey. His first attempts have not survived—but principally, most scholars think, because he was not satisfied with their quality, and, being a fastidious man, a perfectionist, he wanted his art to be worthy of posterity. There are just two presumed self-portraits from this time—one showing him standing by a table and looking down, which is held today in a library in Surrey, the second in the same pose but looking up, which is in the Morgan Library in New York. Both are catalogued in Dodgson’s curiously blocky hand—and in his signature violet ink. They bear the numbers 15 and 16, suggesting there were many others that were either lost or discarded.

Once the long vacation of 1856 started, Dodgson was able to travel beyond Oxford, and he made the conscious decision to take along his camera, the folding darkroom and its chemicals, and all the other paraphernalia. There is some forensic suggestion—mainly from a paper trail of halfway reasonable portraits, some of his family and others of strangers—that he went first home, to Croft. But the most important photographs from this period were taken when he arrived in the second week of June to stay at the house of his paternal uncle Hassard Hume Dodgson, in Putney.

Like Dodgson’s maternal uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, Hassard Dodgson was a barrister, and the holder of another title of Victorian folderol—the Master of the Common Pleas. He was well connected and comfortably off, and lived in a mighty Victorian redbrick pile beside the Thames, Park Lodge. So Dodgson spent his two early summer weeks that year in an atmosphere of congenial relaxation, traveling occasionally into London to exhibits at the Royal Academy and the Society of Watercolourists, as well as visiting Sir Jonathan Pollock—to whom he would in time be distantly related by marriage. Pollock, who, in addition to being a council member of the newly constituted Photographical Society of London and a mathematician (a student of Fermat’s theorem), was at the time one of England’s leading judges, famous for his role in the interminable case of Wright v. Tatham, which many believe was the eight-year-long inspiration for Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Dickens’s great novel Bleak House . Dodgson went to see this formidable personage for advice: he returned entirely convinced that portraiture was to be his métier.

During those two June weeks he worked his way with great deliberation and assiduity through the entire range of subjects who lived in or turned up at Uncle Hassard’s home. There was Hassard himself, then his wife, Caroline Hume, and an assortment of nephews and nieces and friends. Most of them were girls, whose names—Lucy, Laura, Charlotte, Amy, Katherine, and Millicent—far outnumbered those for boys.

One picture from that London interlude stands out: the one he took on the afternoon of June 19, 1856, of the four-year-old daughter of a senior civil servant who also served as the

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Anne Brontë is generally less well-known than Charlotte and Emily, but her novels are just as powerful as the more famous work of her sisters, especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Combining a sensational story of a man’s physical and moral decline through alcohol, a study of marital breakdown, a disquisition on the care and upbringing of children, and a hard-hitting critique of the position of women in Victorian society, this passionate tale of betrayal is set within a stern moral framework tempered by Anne Brontë’s optimistic belief in universal redemption. Drawing on her first-hand experiences with her brother Branwell, Brontë’s novel scandalized contemporary readers and it still retains its power to shock.

Below, Josephine McDonagh, who has written the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, discusses the novel and its reception in a series of podcasts recorded by Podularity.

- On Anne’s life and the imaginative world she and her siblings inhabited.
[See post to listen to audio]
- Was Anne disappointed in love?
[See post to listen to audio]
- How Anne approached the themes of women, marriage, and masculinity that also preoccupied her sisters.
[See post to listen to audio]
- How Anne structured her narrative and how the novel came to called ‘the longest letter in English literature’.
[See post to listen to audio]
- What it means to be a man in the novel.
[See post to listen to audio]
- How the book was received.
[See post to listen to audio]
Listen to more Oxford World’s Classics audio guides

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Today on OUPblog we’re celebrating the 100th International Women’s Day. I’ve invited intern extraordinaire Hanna Oldsman to contribute her thoughts on “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A groundbreaking and important early piece of American feminist literature, it was first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine and has been subject to countless interpretations, as it powerfully illustrates 19th century attitudes about women’s physical and mental health.

By Hanna Oldsman (Publicity Intern)

For me, one of the most interesting lines of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” appears near the very beginning of the story. The words are an aside, a nervous excuse—and the only part of this rambling, uncomfortable tale to be cordoned off with parentheses: “John is a physician,” the narrator writes furtively, “and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind—) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.”

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a story in which dead things come to life. The narrator, ill with what her husband calls a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency,” imagines that the wallpaper that covers her bedroom moves, that behind the “sprawling” pattern creeps a woman, trapped, who shakes the bars that confine her.  When I first read this story, I found it odd that the narrator believes the pages of her diary to be dead while the wallpaper sprouts heads like hydras and its curves “commit suicide—plung[ing] off at outrageous angles,” while its “pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare.” Odd, and also devastating: later in the story, she wishes that she had someone to whom she might divulge her thoughts—someone who might provide “any advice or companionship about [her] works.” There is some connection between the paper on which she writes and the papered walls on which her imagination paints a Gothic tale; it is as if her first imaginative impulses, suppressed, press themselves into the walls.

The irony of the words “but this is dead paper,” is, of course, that they don’t remain hidden: as we read this story, we are made party to the narrator’s madness and forced to take the place of her friends and family who refuse to listen. Her words make the nightmarish hallucinations seem real to us. Reading Gilman’s private writings is a similar experience. I recently had the chance to peruse two books from OUP on the work and life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories, edited by Robert Shulman, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of “The Yellow Wall-Paper”. Wild Unrest, in contrast to other books about this late 19th-century feminist and author, is less about Charlotte Perkins Gilman the public figure and activist than it is about Charlotte’s p

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This evening is the first night of Hanukkah/Hanukah/Chanukah — and what better way is there to celebrate than with a holiday story? Here is “The Cave of Mattathias,” a tale that originated in Eastern Europe and was passed down in the oral tradition. It is one of many stories included in Howard Schwartz’s Leaves from the Garden of Eden: One Hundred Classic Jewish Tales. Happy Hanukah!

In a village near the city of Riminov there was a Hasid whose custom it was to bring newly made oil to Reb Menachem Mendel of Riminov, and the rabbi would light the first candle of Hanukah in his presence.

One year the winter was hard, the land covered with snow, and everyone was locked in his home. But when the eve of Hanukah arrived, the Hasid was still planning to deliver the oil. His family pleaded with him not to go, but he was determined, and in the end he set out across the deep snow.

That morning he entered the forest that separated his village from Riminov, and the moment he did, it began to snow. The snow fell so fast that it covered every landmark, and when at last it stopped, the Hasid found that he was lost. The whole world was covered with snow.

Now the Hasid began to regret not listening to his family. Surely the rabbi would have forgiven his absence. Meanwhile, it had become so cold that he began to fear he might freeze. He realized that if he were to die there in the forest, he might not even be taken to a Jewish grave. That is when he remembered the oil he was carrying. In order to save his life, he would have to use it. There was no other choice.

As quickly as his numb fingers could move, he tore some of the lining out of his coat and fashioned it into a wick, and he put that wick into the snow. Then he poured oil on it and prayed with great intensity. Finally, he lit the first candle of Hanukah, and the flame seemed to light up the whole forest. And all the wolves moving through the forest saw that light and ran back to their hiding places.

After this the exhausted Hasid lay down on the snow and fell asleep. He dreamed he was walking in a warm land, and before him he saw a great mountain, and next to that mountain stood a palm tree. At the foot of the mountain was the opening of a cave. In the dream, the Hasid entered the cave and found a candle burning there. He picked up that candle, and it lit the way for him until he came to a large cavern, where an old man with a very long beard was seated. There was a sword on his thigh, and his hands were busy making wicks. All of that cavern was piled high with bales of wicks. The old man looked up when the Hasid entered and said: “Blessed be you in the Name of God.”

The Hasid returned the old man’s blessing and asked him who he was. He answered: “I am Mattathias, father of the Maccabees. During my lifetime I lit a big torch. I hoped that all of Israel would join me, but only a few obeyed my call. Now heaven has sent me to watch for the little candles in the houses of Israel to come together to form a very big flame. And that flame will announce the Redemption and the End of Days.

“Meanwhile, I prepare the wicks for the day when everyone will contribute his candle to this great flame. And now, there is something that you must do for me. When you reach the Rabbi of Riminov, tell him that the wicks are ready, and he should do whatever he can to light the flame that we have awaited so long.”

Amazed at all he had heard, the Hasid promised to give the message to the rabbi. As he turned to leave the cave, he awoke and found himself standing in front of the rabbi’s house. Just then the rabbi himself opened the door, and his face was glowing. He said: “The power of lighting the Hanukah candles is very great. Whoever dedicates his soul to this deed brings the time

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By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

It was an ordinary enough London winter’s evening: chilly, damp, and churning with crowds. I’d arranged to meet a friend at the Curzon Mayfair cinema, and after my packed tube had been held up between stations – ten sweaty minutes during which my fellow passengers had fumed silently, tutted audibly, and in one or two cases struck up tentative conversations with the person whose shopping was digging into their shins – I was late. Coming out of the entrance to the station, I nimbly side-stepped a beggar with a cardboard sign – sorry, bit of a rush, direct debit to Shelter, can’t stop – and hurried on my way to the cinema.

The film was Slumdog Millionaire: a nerve-shredding if ultimately cheering investigation into the hidden lives of the Indian slums. Coming out of the cinema, though, it was impossible to avoid the realiszation that equally vivid stories lay much closer to home. I retraced my steps to the tube station, and this time instead of brushing the beggar off I listened to what he had to say. It was a sadly familiar account of alcohol, a broken marriage, and homelessness, but as he told it the events took on a vividly personal colouring that was new and strange. He made me look again at what I thought I already knew.

The idea that what takes place under our noses can be hard to see clearly is hardly an original one; indeed, anyone who lives in a city soon learns to recognize the sensation of life being jolted out of its familiar routines, and assumptions being rearranged by new experiences. However, this idea took on a new resonance a few weeks later, when I was asked to edit a new selection of London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew’s mammoth set of interviews with the street-sellers, beggars, entertainers, prostitutes, thieves, and all the rest of the human flotsam and jetsam that had washed up in the capital during the 1840s and 1850s.

Ask most readers – and not a few critics – who Henry Mayhew was, and the result is likely to be at best a puzzled stare. Though his voice pops up occasionally in recent work, from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Deceptions’ to novels such as Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, for the most part he has become the Invisible Man of Victorian culture. And like H. G. Wells’s hero, usually he is detectable only by the movements of his surroundings, from Charles Kingsley’s jeremiad against the exploitation of cheap tailors in Alton Locke, to the strange echoes of his interview subjects in characters like Jo in Dickens’s Bleak House.

In some ways these literary aftershocks and offshoots of London Labour and the London Poor accurately reflect the work’s own generic hybridity. Opening Mayhew’s pages, it is hard to escape the feeling that you are encountering a writer who has one foot in the world of fact, one foot in the world of fiction, and hops between them with a curious mixture of uncertainty and glee. Sober tables of research are interrupted by facts of the strange-but-true variety: ‘Total quantity of rain falling yearly in the metropolis, 10,686,132,230,400 cubic inches’, or ‘The drainage of London is about equal in length to the diameter of the earth itself’. Even cigar-ends don’t escape his myth-making tendencies. Not content with calculating the number thrown away each week (30,000) and guessing at the proportion picked up by the