by Paul Zerby

 “There is an old style of teaching where the teacher has gold bricks of knowledge, reaches back,” said Father Jogues, reaching back over his shoulder, “and hands them out to the students,” miming distribution. “We believe in the pizza style, where each of us puts an ingredient on the pizza, and the facilitator,” he looked at me, “is the crust.” We were beginning the second of a four-session workshop called “Writing Fiction from Life” I’d been engaged to teach the Storyweavers, a group of seniors who had been meeting weekly over the past year to work on their writing, on their own, thank you. Father Jogues looked at me and waited. 

by Patricia Weaver Francisco

My mother and my brother had a running battle about the existence of what she called “true facts,” a species fundamentally different from its less glamorous, less noteworthy cousin, the fact. A true fact is a slippery character, she was first to admit, but she knew one when she saw it. My brother countered that a fact is a fact is a fact because a fact is simply true. A true fact makes no more sense than a near miss, he’d say, calmly claiming victory. Ah, my mother would smile, my point exactly. A miss and a near miss are entirely different matters . . .

by David Housewright

Despite what you might have been told in grade school, people are not the same everywhere. They are different, and where they are from and how they live are part of what makes them different.   

This is why setting is so essential to a book or story.   

An important goal of any writer is to achieve reader identification. We want readers to see themselves in the lead character, to share the leader’s thoughts and emotions. Certainly, this sort of identification has a great deal to do with whether or not we find a work of fiction involving enough to stay with it and what we’ll think about it once we’ve finished reading. The more we feel that the lead character is a person like us, that he thinks and reacts like we do, the more involved we will be in his story. 

by Kimberly J. Brown

As writers, how do we achieve a breakthrough? Is it possible to surprise and delight ourselves with what we write? Yes, but the question is how. We can sit at a desk and write, but how can we access the uninhibited images lurking beneath our consciousness?

For me, it’s writing in the dark. In the liminal state.

The liminal state is that transitional state of consciousness that’s half awake, half asleep. The name comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold.

by Emily Brisse

My girlfriends and I have a Christmas tradition: we exchange ornaments, and after, we verbally unpack our individual years, one by one, no time restrictions. The only rule we adhere to is that for every low, there must be two highs.

It is August now, months away from ornaments and tinsel, but one full year since I finished my MFA degree, and I feel the same tendencies today to look back and evaluate as I usually do at the close of a calendar. So, will you be my listeners here? My non-sweater-clad friends? All I ask is that you mumble a few hmmms, perhaps nod once in a while. After all, we’ve each experienced the ups and downs of something, right?