If You’re a Writer and Feeling Low Today, Read This

The Verb is an e-magazine for writers that I have been reading regularly for many years. The Verb is edited by Elizabeth Guy and published by Reading Writers.

I enjoy The Verb’s fresh crisp style. There is not a single word out-of-place or extra and each sentence takes you a step forward. This magazine is full of interesting information and anecdotes for and about writers, a contest or two to keep those creative juices flowing and some friendly tips as well. The September 2010 issue of The Verb is no exception. And I am taking the liberty of copy pasting a portion here that I especially loved. This is from their “A Moment in the History of Writing” column:

In 1959 a struggling writer, who seriously considered giving up the writing life, joined her family for a cross-country camping trip. On this trip, an idea struck her, and it wouldn’t go away. 

Ten weeks later, when she returned to her home in Connecticut, she sat down to write the story. She began with a deliberate old chestnut from 19^th  century novelist, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, It was a dark and stormy night, because she realized the importance of getting the reader’s attention.

“Every one of Shakespeare’s plays starts with an attention-getter. Otherwise, the audience would throw rotten fruit. I get my own attention first. If it doesn’t grab me, it’s not going to grab the reader.”

Feeling a strong kinship with Einstein, she added concepts she had plucked from his theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory. She also broke a taboo of the time: she made the protagonist female.

By 1960, the book was finished, and she was ecstatic. “I knew it was a good book when I finished it. I knew it was the best thing I’d ever done.”

But it was a book nobody wanted.

When she checked her mailbox, she found nothing but rejection letters. More than two dozen of them. No one knew what to do with the book, or what sort of audience it targeted.

After two and a half years of hitting the wall, she finally met John Farrar of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. But unlike the other publishers, he loved what he read and wasted no time snatching up the manuscript. It was published in 1962.

The book nobody wanted was A Wrinkle in Time, and it proved to be Madeleine L’Engle’s masterpiece. It won the John Newbery Medal as the best children’s book of 1963 and, now in its 69^th printing, has sold over eight million copies.

“I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him,” she said. “I know that is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”

How to Remember Me

a short poem

is up in this month’s Shine Journal

Read it here:

http://www.theshinejournal.com/biswasr.htm

Read the rest of Septemebr Issue of Shine here:

http://www.theshinejournal.com/

Meet me in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal!

Go to the link below:

http://asiancha.blogspot.com/2010/09/meet-rumjhum-biswas.html

The September Issue of Cha will soon be out, then you can meet my poem as well!

Wired Ruby is a brand new e-magazine “for chicks and by chicks;” it’s “a literary zine that is primarily geared toward a female audience or anyone that simply likes women’s genre fiction.”

To quote from the magazine’s ‘about us’ page: ” We are the essence of the well-rounded woman. If you like chicklit, grab a cosmo and pull up a seat. If you like a little romance in your daily grind, dim the lights and slip into something comfortable. If you yearn for answers to the deep buried secrets of the female soul, we have the nectar you crave. We are not your college professor’s literary magazine. We are an outlet for women’s fiction of all shapes and sizes, with some poetry and non fiction thrown in for taste. We are Wired Ruby.”

 The first issue is just out.

Philosophy and intent apart, Wired Ruby is different from other magazines of its ilk  on the net. The layout is more like a paper magazine, where you click on the top right corner to go to the next page and vice versa in a movement that imitates the flicking of a paper page. The tone is not high brow literary, and there is a big dollop of humour. I read the first issue today and enjoyed the utterly female experiences, viewpoints and poetry. I think women need more humour in their lives, and am glad there’s a magazine that caters to this need without being ‘a funny-funny magazine!’

And oh, before I forget – my story ”Marital Bliss” (which has a largish helping of askance humour) appears in this first issue of Wired Ruby.

Hope you like it!

Aftertaste – a Review of Pomegranate, Stories by Gay Degani

Pomegranate, Stories by Gay Degani

When I first read “Pomegranate” I wondered why Gay Degani, the author of this collection of short stories, chose this name for her book.  She could have picked the titles of any one of the other seven stories, why specifically Pomegranate? Curious I read the title story first.

“When I was seven I was stolen by gypsies.”

The first line. One crisp sentence. And I knew I had to finish the story. Right there. Right then. 

Pomegranate, the title story, is one of the longer pieces in the collection. The narrative of the girl’s life in captivity has the staccato rhythm of a  van lurching down a country road. The story, like the fruit, leaves behind a layered aftertaste. You are not sure where you can go with it, and almost unconsciously you find yourself reading Pomegranate again.

Gay Degani’s sentences are so sharp, that they continue to surprise even during the second reading. It’s as if she has pulled the canvas so tight across its frame that the scenes and characters almost seem to jump off. The human foibles and emotions depicted in her stories pull and pull until the muscles of your heart feel taut.  Most of the stories in “Pomegranate” have that kind of effect. They are mostly flash fiction, making for a slim volume that you could finish in one afternoon. But the stories, once inside your head, simply refuse to let go. Whether it’s about a woman driving home to meet her dying father or another, with a dysfunctional life, going to the airport to pick up her very organised mother; a basketball crazy young girl’s  last vision, two sisters with their terrible secret, a mother’s grief so intense it has turned ice-cold or a wedding guest’s relationship with her mother-in-law, Gay Degani’s fiction have something more to say even after they have been read.

Afterwards, it dawned on me. Reading “Pomegranate” was like eating the fruit! The narrative is quick, but like the juicy pomegranate seeds that drip and run the minute you bite into them, you have to be ready to find your hand sticky with these stories.  And then there’s that tight feeling after you’re done, like the lingering astringent aftertaste of pomegranates.

Autograph

 

Blogging on Stage!

It may sound improbable, but that is precisely what the teams behind Indi-Bloggers and Stray Factory are about to do- take the blog to the stage!  In other words, this is where and how two separate media will merge. trust me, the likes of something like this has never been attempted before, any where!

What’s going to happen is this: Blogs will be taken out from their cyber homes and flung on to the stage. Yes, an actual physical stage. The blogger, his or her thoughts, words and ideas will be enacted and brought to life in the physical three-dimensional world. Like regular theatre, there will be props and stage lights et al. And the blogger’s blog post will be in the centre of it all. 

The ball has already been set to roll by the IndiBlogger team, and some thirty blog posts have already been shortlisted. This bunch (of blogs) will be further winnowed down to those that are most adaptable to stage or are most likely to reach out to a varied audience comprising regular theatre goers, bloggers and everybody else in between. The first audition took place on this Saturday past (19th August), supervised by The Stray Factory team. Sparks flew as ideas ignited while a group of  young and young at heart enthusiasts poured out their opinions and ideas and read. During the ensuing months blog posts will turn into scripts, actors selected and rehearsals held. In short preparations will be made for the voices of unknown talented Indians to be heard. 

 Keep yourselves free for the Great Indian Blogologue, which will premier on October 31st this year at the Sivagami Pettachi Auditorium, Chennai. 

For more information about Stray Factory go here

To know more about Indi Blogger click on this link

Short Strike from Kiran Desai

I’ve been waiting for something from Kiran Desai for many long moons. It’s been four years since Inheritance of Loss. Long enough time for a whole book to appear. Meanwhile, I have just finished savouring for the second time this short strike from her pen, like a cocktail snack. (And looking forward to the banquet in the near future!)

True Nature of the Beast appeared in India Today and was posted in Sasialit, an online literary forum on South Asian literature, by one of the members. This is, to quote from the blurb in India Today,  ”a tongue-in-cheek look at Indian-American writers as well as their desi counterparts”, and very much in line with Kiran Desai’s style, especially Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard. What I find special about her writing is that while she makes you smile or laugh, she also makes you look at things more closely. This article for instance is all about South Asian writers abroad and India and in between. And now having read it, I can’t help but think how stereotypical my own attitude towards desi writers is, English language writers as well as those who write in the regional languages.

Another thing, for some reason ”Aloo,” the protagonist of her article reminds me of a famous Indian writer, married to an American, the “objective critic come writer from the cowbelt” from the same article reminds me of another critic-come-publishing-editor-come-writer from India and the ”another young writer in India who is getting really mad” reminds me of an international writer star of Indian origin, but confusing citizenship. Of course, I am probably wrong. I must be wrong. I am. Kiran Desai wrote this with her tongue firmly in cheek, which is quite typical of her.  And of course I enjoyed it! As usual.

Dreams in The Brown Critique’s August Issue

This year’s August Issue of The Brown Critique has a reprint of my poem “Dreams.”

You have to scroll down to read.

Dreams was first published in The Every Day Poets.

 

The poem,  How Mother Is was published in Every Day Poets on August 13.

The flash fiction, Flight came out a day or two after in Up the Staircase. 

Good weekend, from start to finish!

A Mention of Me at Art House Holidays

Good way to begin a Monday I say.

Last week I had shot off the opening paragraphs of a short story I wrote to The Art House Competition. Last night they wrote back saying that although I did not win the coveted prize which entitles the winner to a writing holiday in bewitching Andalucía! In their own words - ”The winner will receive a fully paid place on the writing fiction course with Andrew Miller (Sep 8th-13th, 2010) in Sanlúcar (Andalucía, Spain). ”  Lucky, lucky Edwin Kelly!

My name figures among the highly commended along with Barra Bromley, Andrew Campbell-Kearsey, Peter Myson and Tom Sheehan. That’s a good thing to happen; helps keep the faith burning!

You can get details about The Art House here

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