Writing Archives - Page 4 of 19

Inhabiting an Inner Stance

Nancy Flynn May 17, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Wisdom, Writing

After the shock of the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016, oh so many of us felt upended, and at loose ends. A wise and deeply soulful friend encouraged me to do some soul searching and craft my personal inner stance, statements that could inspire and guide me when the waves got choppy, when the going got rough. I crafted my angst into words; time and time again during those turbulent years, I would steady myself by taking a look at my words. Speed ahead in time to find us eight years later and, amazingly, shockingly, horribly, things these days seem to be even worse.

RIP to Alice Munro, the GOAT of the Short Story

Nancy Flynn May 14, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Arts & Culture, Writing

The news just came over the wires—well, they are the bits and bytes, ones and zeroes, of the Internet these days I guess. Sometime last night, while I was winging my way back from a visit to my son in Burbank, California, Alice Munro, the Canadian Nobel prizewinning master of the short story, died in a Port Hope, Ontario care home after nearly 93 years of a long and interesting life. …

Publication News: Scintilla

Nancy Flynn May 13, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Publication News, Writing

My rambling, stream-of-consciousness, mostly autobiographical exploration of a day in the life alongside a memory of a difficult time and the symbolism of a shower of visiting ladybugs is entitled “Fly. Away. Home.” It appeared in in the second issue of Scintilla…

Writing in Form: The Prose Poem

Nancy Flynn May 7, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Poetic Form, Publication News, Writing

I started my creative writing journey in the wilds of prose, specifically fiction. My SUNY-Binghamton graduate school classes concentrated on fiction; my master’s thesis was a novel-in-progress. Even when I started making the shift to writing more poetry, I still dabbled in the prose poem—it felt familiar and doable to me. According to the Poetry Foundation, a prose poem is “a prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry.”

Judging a Poetry Contest…

Nancy Flynn May 2, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Awards, Writing, Writing Contests

In Fall 2012, I volunteered to be the judge for the New Poets category of the Oregon Poetry Association (OPA) contests. The OPA definition of a new poet is someone with no more than two poems published in print or online journals. Anything self-published or posted on a personal website or blog also counts as published…

Book Review: The Art of Voice by Tony Hoagland

Nancy Flynn April 19, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Arts & Culture, Book Report, Poetic Form, Writing

There are numerous ways to bring the art of the voice into poetry. We speak. We converse. We inhabit personas and personalities. We wail. We squawk. We squeal. We complain. We rant, rave, and react. We sound off with authority and verve. We simply and merely utter. And this is all the part of the notion of poetic voice. And in all of these varied utterances, we instinctively inhabit multiple registers of diction—high, middle, and low according to the late poet Tony Hoagland (with Kay Cosgrove) in his short, sweet, and very smart book of essays, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice…

Here Comes the Sun!

Nancy Flynn April 15, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Gardening, Wisdom, Writing

This was a week all about the sun. One way or another, millions of inhabitants on this geographic outpost of Planet Earth looked up, grew …

Publication News: “A Month of Sundays”

Nancy Flynn April 10, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Publication News, Writing

“A Month of Sundays” is a freewheeling, leaping, highly experimental poem that glories in sonics and sound. In it, I took the English names for every month of the calendar year, fractured them into syllables then refashioned them into the language used in a dozen quatrains, beginning and ending with the month of July. I remember it was fun to write
…

Crafting a Poetry Aesthetic

Nancy Flynn April 8, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Wisdom, Writing

For many years, I have grounded my creative writing work in my singular poetry aesthetic. Below is the gist and pith of it. My poetry is an attempt to exhume moments of revelation along this journey of a constant becoming. I write as part of my attempt to seek (a temporary and temporal) understanding of the peripatetic instants of this life. Through poetry, I hope to explore, excavate, celebrate, and, at times, resurrect. I want to cut to the chase, to the heart of the matter, even it means staring down grief and pain…

Writing in Form: The Elegy

Nancy Flynn April 6, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Publication News, Writing

Grief. Sadness. Loss. All of these emotions lend themselves to expression in poetry even as we find ourselves desperately searching for words. Often such an occasion calls for the somber, elevated language of the elegy. This elegy has an important epigraph giving context as to the reason for this Buddhist funeral ceremony in northern Thailand of a dear, dear friend…

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