Blog: "Stalled? Here’s one way to jump-start your writing" 🎉
So honored to be a part of the conversation today at talented Kate Bradley-Ferrall’s marvelous blog. along with inspired author and writing instructor Sue Bradford Edwards. Check out how “writing in unfamiliar genres can reboot your writing and challenge you in interesting and inspiring ways.” 🎉📝
"3 Techniques to Write More Vibrant Poetry"
Thrilled that my craft article was published today at Women on Writing! 💗 In the market for an online poetry course that starts in November? Check out my class here. Read on for the article:
3 Techniques to Write More Vibrant Poetry
By: Melanie Faith
Whether we want to write free-verse or a sonnet, a haiku, or a prose poem, some key elements are universal in poetry: vivid imagery and precision of diction choices are two widely agreed-upon qualities of successful poems. The following are three less talked-about techniques that are every bit as vital that could take your verse to an exciting new level.
Everyday is A-Okay: Sometimes, we get the impression poems have to be about monumental subjects or events. Not always so. While there certainly are classic poems to commemorate the big-day events in life, such as high-school graduation or joining the military or marriage or the birth of a child, there are myriad more poems about small observations and tiny moments that, without art, a person could easily move past without reflection.
In fact, the reflections and observations that occur about ordinary topics can, indeed, be extraordinary for readers. I’m reading a collection of poems this week where dates are the titles of each work. In some of the poems, the poet describes people and events of the day literally. In others, the speaker of the poem is obviously someone different than the author or the author combines time periods.
Something authentic and tangible that we observe from our day might spark a poem and then the poem could veer in an imaginative way that surprises and combines fact with fiction—also totally acceptable and, in many casing, inspiring ground for creating poems.
Open your poem with an image grounded in real-life, but stay open to associative leaps that serve the poem, too.
Empty Some Space: Poetry is a compressed art. When I first started to write poetry, as a fiction writer, my tendency was to write long lines (almost margin to margin) crammed with details. I also rarely included stanza breaks.
One day, in graduate school, a favorite professor took one of my poems and, in his critique, marked several places where empty space (sometimes called “white space”) would improve the poem. Mind blown! When I retyped my poem, incorporating the blank spaces, I immediately saw how the focus was stronger on each image and indeed each line and stanza break as well.
Then, I did another round of emptying space: I looked for unnecessary prepositional phrases, words that were vague or place-fillers, and other ways to focus my language even more. The more I refined by taking away from the page as I edited, the more the theme cohered and strengthened.
Both ways of compressing poetry—including more stanzas or new stanza or line breaks to highlight certain key images or words as well as editing out cluttering or vague phrases—can go a long way to bringing resonance to your poems.
Dialogue it up! One literary technique I don’t see often enough in poems is dialogue. While prose frequently incorporates conversations, quotations, or the inner thoughts of characters or speakers, poetry infrequently does.
There are many styles of poetry that even just a line of dialogue could help to set place/setting, time period/era, tone, characterization of the speaker or character, as well as the theme. Narrative and prose poems particularly work well for integrating dialogue, but no need to stop with these formats.
Sonnets could include dialogue or a quoted phrase or inner thoughts of the speaker, for example. Or, a line of spoken or internal thought could become the title of a haiku, tanka, or other style of poem that sets up the body of the poem’s theme or conflict. Or a famous quote could be used as an epigraph to launch into your topic’s theme.
Many types of poems could benefit from dialogue, from lyric poetry and ekphrastic work (such as a line from a song or quote from an online show or another art form) to formal styles, like villanelles (where a repeated question or thought could work wondrously). The sky’s the limit!
Try this prompt: For 3 days, write down three things that happen in your daily life or 3 things you observe about your day, such as an image or an overheard piece of conversation in passing. At the end of the 3 days, pick one of the observations from your list and write a first draft of a poem from this real-life impetus. If the poem veers off of “what actually happened” or if a new image arrives, wonderful and go with it!
"Ekphrastic Magic" Exhibition at Revela'T Analog Photography Festival 📄🖊📸
Super excited to have poetry in the awesome collaborative "Ekphrastic Magic" photo-poetry project curated by the fabulous @amyjasek @filmshooterscollective in the international Revela'T Analog Photography Festival, currently running in Barcelona! Check out the festival website for excerpts of the excellent work in the "Ekphrastic Magic" exhibit as well as a listing of other fine photographers/photographic exhibits now on view in Spain and on their Instagram @revelatfestival .
More details about the exhibit: “The Film Shooters Collective is proud to present ‘Ekphrastic Magic’: an interdisciplinary project bringing together thirty FSC members and thirty writers. In it / Ekphrastic Magic, the private world of the photographer becomes the solitary walk of a poet, and together they create a new, unique universe, welcoming in the viewer to bring their own experiences to their personal interpretation of the work. The photographs range from 35mm and 120 film to instant film and even tintype; the images and words are as diverse as the artists who made them.”
To celebrate, I thought I'd post this film photo I took this summer on #kodak #kodakfilm with my #35mmfilm Canon camera. Can't resist glasses, violets, and reflections.
Portable Muse Cards: Relaunch! 📓🖊
One of my fun summer projects has been this box redesign of my Portable Muse cards. This time, I used my own photography for the box front and back and chose another, clearer font. Ta-da! The Portable Muse.
Same great prompts to get your Muse moving! The perfect gift for you and the writers in your life.
More deets below:
“Are you a creative writer whose Muse has gone into a sputter? Wondering: "What should I write about today?" Or are you a teacher with a classroom or workshop filled with eager scribes who need fresh prompts? Wonder no more!
What are they?
• A series of 30 prompts on handy-dandy, beautiful cards. One varied prompt per card. Some include quotations, some situations, others a title or a setting.
• Sure to inspire fiction, essays, poetry, and more!
• Very portable! Slip into your pocket, purse, backpack, or tote and carry them with you to write in cafes, waiting rooms, on your commute, or wherever the day takes you!”
Check out these and other fine products at my Etsy store: WritePathProductions.
Prose Poem Published 🖊📓
Wonderful news! My prose poem, “Return to Beck,” was published at Cerasus Magazine, a fantastic international literary magazine out of the UK. (Props to my fellow Gen Xers and ’90s babies in the house. 😎✨🎸)
Check out the many fantastic artists in Issue #2, submission guidelines here, and read on for a small excerpt from parts of four stanzas in my piece:
“Return to Beck” excerpt:
I look down this very long set of rectangular tables pushed together and there is Beck, dressed like the ’90s, singing along to Beck. And I walk past him, also singing Beck, thinking: “Keep it cool. Pretend this is just a normal thing, Beck sitting here, singing his own song”…
Beck never made eye contact (cool customer); he just went about his business, giving off 100% Beckness. The Beckness was just real-life rolling off of him, down the tables, and people milling around but nobody saying this was any big thing, this was just the same old Beckitude, any day of the week. And I was trying to keep my stuff together. Sure, I could mill around, I could keep it cool…
I took down some fizzled balloons, some soggy streamers wound around my bare arms, outside the party, outside the door, but didn’t see the trash can, didn’t see anybody, so I turned back to Beck, walked back in. There he still was, being all 100% Beck, Beckalicious, Becktastic. He hadn’t moved….
I was trying to keep it together, “just keep it together,” and walking around him at the terribly long tables and him not making eye contact, and the ’90s were back but we had nowhere to take them. So Beck kept singing Beck, Beckifically, and the Beckness was all around, 100% authentic, the ’90s were oozing…
For the entire, much longer prose poem, check out Issue 2.
My Photo Published, "Moment Series--Wish and Shadow" 😎
Thrilled to say that my photo, “Moment Series—Wish and Shadow,” was published today in the art gallery of Songs of Eretz Poetry Review.
Check out a few reflections I made about my photo as well as the work of the amazing poets, such as my dear friend Charles A. Swanson, and artists featured in this Summer 2021 Love Issue.
Ekphrastic Magic Project 📸📓
Super excited to have a poem I wrote in a fantastic project, “Ekphrastic Magic," a photography and poem collaboration, this summer. It is part of an international photo festival in Barcelona, Spain!
Many thanks to the amazingly talented Amy Jasek at Film Shooters Collective for the artistic camaraderie, for her vision and hard work in putting this project together, and for the wonderful invitation to take part.
Learn more about Revela’t and their festival.
Photo Courtesy of Markus Winkler at Unsplash.com
Great News: Beyond Words Literary Magazine Second Printing
So pleased that this issue of the stellar international literary journal, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, from last June has now gone into a second printing! 😍📸
I have photography in the June 2020 issue as well as in their current May 2021 issue.
Get your copy/subscription today @beyondwordsmagazine . Also, consider submitting your words or art.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
