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Meet Lydia Suarez
When writing fiction, readers will not believe that you are lying. The reader assumes the experiences, events
and emotions must be the truth. With memoirs, one tells the truth and others may dispute the way it happened.
Writing for me, is filled with contradictions and defeats. Mellifluous words that sing in my head, clunk on the paper. From
the time I learned to read, and it was not at a prodigious age, I was captivated by the boxes that arrived with my weekly
reader. My father paid for my first and only book club when it could have been considered a luxury. My mother, a gifted
and animated reader, acted out those stories of Ping's late arrival on the Yangtze, Lyle the Crocodile's musings on
the Upper East Side, and Harry the free spirited suburban dog. I was raised in apartments, in a city across the river from
Manhattan where factories released coffee bean aromas that mingled with the clean scent of Laundromats and summertime's
simmering tar. We had our own version of Harry near a dye plant where the stray mutts were indigo furred. Literature
transported me and made me pliable. As a first generation American of Cuban parents, I was overprotected, socially inept
among my peers who were not sheltered and blessed to be an outsider. That made me a writer.

Meet Kausam R. Salam Coming Together with Poetry I often think
back to when I was five or six and wrote down my earliest nightmare about a black wire on an open field. I don't know
if that wire was a barbed wire or a simple black thread upon the horizon. In my mind, I was alone and had to climb over it
or climb under it, but I knew I had to do something. When my eyes opened, I wrote and wrote in my child's handwriting;
words scrawled all over the page, tall letters and fat dots--this energy let me know everything, even nightmares have a solution.
Poetry was a solution, sometimes a resolution about unexplained phenomena; it was the first cause of my communication with
those around me. Fragmented words and hushed syllables came out of a little voice that was expected to answer the adults around
me. As I grew older, I heard so much music--poetry was sung to me at breakfast,
old lyrical songs in Persian, English, Urdu, and even German--the human voice had the power to move me to tears and joy at
the same time. Grandfather's poems my father sang aloud, explaining their translation in English. Irish songs and Afghani
songs had nothing to do with me superficially; yet their melodies enchanted me. Then I read A Child's Garden of Verses,
a colorful first book of children's poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. This was my first conscious birthday gift from my
parents. There were more chances to listen to poets of various languages
recite their poems on the weekends. Akka (my father) would take me on the subway to Manhattan's Metropolitan Insurance
Company where the only "insurance" talk was a group of poets who were given a life-guarantee that their voices would
be heard--the Bengali poet sang his lines, he who lost both home and family to a dictator enemy who destroyed humanity to
shreds. Another poet sang in Urdu about her identity and her personal value in a humorous, satirical way. Then, some poets
recited their ideas in English; others nodded and achieved "hal qal"--a kind of heightened sense of...well highness...over
nothing but mere words, for alcohol was never served here. Thus, poetry came to mean a universal language, like music, that
no one could divide or separate from despite those who lived for cultural divisions. Poetry and unity came together for me.
In college, poetry became my reclusive nature, and I celebrated the Ozarks
with childish romantic lines. I listened to Derek Walcott and Lahna Diskin and Miller Williams give their recitations and
felt a strange kinship that drove me away from traditional book learning and into the heart of people's hearts. A certain
comparative literature professor named John Locke, yes that was his real name, let me write notes in poetic form and offered
bonus points for poems related to each class. Then, he'd invite the fragile, overly sensitive students in his office for
a chat where he kept clean white towels folded up as in drawers of hotels, in case someone couldn't take his criticism
anymore and had to have a good cry. Sadly, I cried and kept taking his criticism. One time he called me an "airy fairy"
who kept her face in the air instead of "over here." As a teacher,
many years later, I discovered John Locke was killed by a favorite graduate student, shot right in the heart, and died instantly.
Poetry and violence came together for me on that day. I met a descendant of the American poet, Holmes, who proudly taught
a creative writing course. He allowed experimentation and celebrated a blend of styles. Then, a severe director-poet told
me not to apply for an MFA, that an easterner couldn't possibly write for a western and southern audience--"stay
with the education major, honey...you'll be safe that way." Then poetry and criticism came together for me. Later when I read more of Billy Collins, I remembered Miller Williams' criticism of this
dynamite poet. And poetry and praise came together for me. As I taught at
a rural school in Cisne, Illinois, the Spanish poets Neruda and Machado came into my poetic consciousness. Dreams and reality
came together for me. In the inner city, Galena Park, my Flushing-Queens-jump-roping
childhood came back to me. I read Tupac Shakur--whose poems influenced my student, Gerald, "Big G." Poetry and perception
came together for me. I couldn't stop thinking through every new idea
without the lens of poetry. Every important conversation became a poetic entry in my journal, and poems became my personal
oral tradition as I communicated with my students and my own children. Today
I can't imagine a life without poetry in the same way I can't imagine a life without the contemplation of God.

Meet Marjorie Petesch I love writing, and
I look forward to the daily two-hour block I've decreed as my ‘I'm writing; don't bother me' time.
Still, sometimes it's really hard and all I want to do is quit. I've
worked full time for thirty-plus years and only began to write when my younger son went off to college. That's when
I decided it was time I fulfilled one of my lifelong dreams. I signed up for a creative writing course at the local
university and by the end of the semester, I was hooked. I registered for a second class, joined a writing group, and
began attending writing workshops. Finishing my first novel took
a very long time, even though the entire story had been in my head for months. Fast forward six years: My novel,
my beautiful baby, was finished. I edited, rewrote, re-edited, shoved it in a drawer for six months, pulled it out,
re-edited, rewrote. I did my homework, crafted a compelling query letter, and sent it off to my carefully-researched
list of agents. After forty-three rejections, I tossed both the novel and its half-finished sequel into a hat box, sulked
for a few weeks, and turned my focus to short stories. Thankfully, success
there has been a bit more forthcoming. I've had seven short stories and one piece of flash fiction accepted for
publication; three short stories were included in anthologies. Submitting
my writing to competitions and literary journals is a large part of what keeps me writing. Some days, what I write isn't
all that good, but sometimes it is. And when I've edited, studiously ignored it for several weeks, then pulled it
out, polished, and edited to the best of my ability, I send it off and cross my fingers. It may not win, but I know
I've submitted my best work. Besides, hope springs eternal. You can't win if you don't enter! Family and friends from time to time say, "You know, you really ought to write about
. . . . [fill in blank here]. And I try to become excited about their suggestions. But inevitably, I fail.
Their passion isn't my passion. I can only write about what captures my imagination. Sometimes it's the
odd comment in an obituary; perhaps an offhand statement overheard in a restaurant or grocery store. Now and then, it's
a news article, usually on an obscure topic, that catches my eye. Then the ‘what if' thoughts flood my brain,
and the fun begins. I wander off to that place where I create the reality and let the characters point the way.
I read voraciously, always on the lookout for that novel that pulls me
in so completely that I'm disappointed when it ends and I'm tossed back into real life. If my writing can make
that magic happen for a reader, I'll consider myself a successful author. That's the carrot that keeps me writing.
My husband and I are hard at work on Life-Phase II. We spend our
weekends, holidays and vacation time clearing long-neglected pastures and fields on property we bought in rural North Carolina.
Our dream is to build a small house, retire from our day jobs and become gentleman / gentlewoman farmers. I can't wait to sashay out of the fast lane and into a life where, first and foremost,
I write. Any spare time I might have, I'll devote to tending a large orchard and vegetable garden. We're
toying with the idea of raising a few cattle, meat goats, guinea hens, rabbits, and possibly a horse or two for the grandchildren
to ride. But for me, it's the writing that's important.
Not writing isn't an option.

Andrew Blackman As a child, I wrote stories to express the things I could never
seem to say out loud. In the quiet of my room, alone with a blunt, heavily chewed pencil and a scrap
of paper, I felt free. If I made a mistake, I could rub it out and get it right the second time, or the
third. I shaped the words with my small, chocolate-stained fingers, and the results pleased me. So
different from spoken words, which seemed to come out of their own accord, often jumbled or inaccurate, and could never be
rubbed out. These days I have a laptop, and my fingers are stained with coffee
rather than chocolate, but otherwise my writing process remains remarkably similar. The results, of course, are different. My ideas have changed radically since I was eight. Rather
than being obsessed with the unfairness of teachers or parents, I am now obsessed with societal injustice. Instead
of grumbling about having to clean my room, I grumble about who will clean the planet. I have been influenced
by literature from around the world: Jorge Luis Borges, André Brink, Kazuo Ishiguro and others. I
have had formal training, too: a history degree from Oxford University, a master’s in journalism from Columbia, three
years as a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York. I have learned much from all of these
sources and have watched myself improving as a writer. But now, as I
enter my thirties, I have decided to return to my childhood instinct that the truth is best told through fiction. I
have moved back to London, taken a break from journalism, and written a couple of novels and a drawer full of short stories,
one of which was recently published by Leaf Books. In the novel excerpted on this site, I try to express the sense of smallness, both geographic and psychological, that I felt on returning from America to Britain. I
imagine a couple of Londoners, inspired by Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic “On the Road,” setting off on a road
trip, only to discover that the horizon of Britain in 2008 is not so broad as that of fifties America. I
also explore the two countries’ fascination with each other’s mythology, a subject that has informed much of my
work recently. No matter what I write about, though, my main aim right now is
to recapture the freedom I felt as a tongue-tied eight year old letting rip against the world with his grubby little HB pencil.

Jerry Ryan
I started
writing seriously in the early 90s. I enjoyed an unplanned sabbatical from my job
and went back to school. I took a writing course, “Writing the Natural Way” using the book by Gabriele Rico. It
was like someone let the genie out of the bottle. I haven’t stopped writing since. The clustering technique unleashes
the hidden treasures locked in the right side of the brain and gets them onto paper. It’s a technique I use in writing
fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, poetry, and business letters. I found that writing was the cheapest form of therapy I could find. Fiction writing allows me to test characters
with ethical flaws in situations that test those ethics. Sometimes I know what the characters will do. Often, they surprise
me and insist on doing something I hadn’t planned for them to do. That’s when writing is really a kick.
As you can see from my submission, I love cycling. With over 30 years and
35,000 miles in the saddle, I've had my fair share of cycling experiences. The idea for writing about cycling came from
friends constantly calling with questions about buying a bicycle, what accessories to have, where to ride, how to fix....
you get the idea. The result was a series of articles written for novice to intermediate cyclists and enjoyed by all those
who bicycle and love to read about cycling. They say “Write what you know.” It’s true.
I wrote constantly and submitted
work for about three years before I hooked up with Windy City Sports. That seemed to be the key to becoming more
successful. When someone pays you regularly for what you write, you’re a writer, not just a dilettante. I still enter
competitions and still meet with more rejections than acceptance, but I keep plugging away.
I write poetry to work through life issues, to
stay in emotional touch with feelings often repressed in daily life. My day job isn’t that satisfying on a gut level.
Poetry fills a need that other forms of writing don’t. I’ve been fortunate to win a few poetry
competitions along the way.
Poetry became a tool to prime the pump for ideas for my other writings. I found I enjoyed the denseness of
language and economy of words inherent in a poem. Poetry is a discipline that I now enjoy for its own pleasure.
I started entering writing
competitions as a way to test the waters for my writing. As an unagented author, I found it was difficult
to get short stories and poems published. Competitions are a great place for your work to be judged by people who will give
your work a good, critical read. When you win a few, it helps your bio when you submit elsewhere.
Competitions usually have judges who are sincerely
interested in finding work that they would love to publish. Many contests are run by university fine arts programs that are
looking for good new work, as opposed to the literary and commercial markets where your story or poem is one more manuscript
plucked out of the slush pile and read by an overworked and underpaid editorial assistant or intern.
I entered a competition from Next Stop Hollywood that called for short stories
that might lend themselves to film or TV projects. From over 600 submissions, 15 were selected for inclusion, one of mine
among them. "A.K.A." is a love story and a crime story involving two ex-DEA agents and an exotic
dancer, a drug deal gone wrong, and mistaken identity. The prize included publication in the St. Martin’s Press anthology
(http://nextstophollywood.org), a small cash advance, a split of royalties with the other authors and the publisher, and best of all, some
nice participation if the stories are optioned and/or produced.
I try to write every day. With a full time job, that’s
not always easy. Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird wrote about not waiting for the Muse to
move you before sitting down to write. If you sit down to write every day, the Muse will know where to find you.
I’m trying, Anne, I’m trying.
I would recommend joining a good writers' group that offers support along with a high level
of critique, a group that allows you to read your work aloud. It’s amazing how your best work stands out, and how your
less than stellar effort show up when you hear it out loud. It’s easy to spot the bumps in your work.
I enter at least four competitions every month. I have a
completed a nonfiction book compiled from the cycling articles I’ve written entitled Bicycle Crazy: A Practical
Guide to Life on Two Wheels. I’ll be looking for a small publisher or agent. I have several novellas, screenplays,
and short stories in the can that I’m always shopping. I have over fifty poems that I’m always looking to place.
I’m 30,000 words into a sci-fi novel that includes time travel, asteroids, dinosaurs, and, of course, human beings with
human failings.
Editor's note: Excerpts from the above essay were previously published
in interview form in firstwriter.com newsletter. Firstwriter.com is a resource offering contest listings, a literary agent and book publisher's database, informative articles, and so
much more! Check them out.
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Adrian S. Potter
I begin most creative sessions without a notion of what I’m
crafting. Since I write both verse and prose, the line separating them often
becomes obscure. “Meditation on Meditation” started as a flash fiction piece. Since there was no true plot, I gradually
converted it into a prose poem, and then a free verse poem. This process wasn’t
derived from any textbook guidance, but it’s a tactic that has served me well.
Decent poems can grow from a descriptive paragraph that’s trapped inside a failed short story; similarly strong
fiction can sometimes be birthed by a vivid line in a scrapped sonnet.
I am a believer of writing as a vehicle for catharsis, confession,
and change. In other words, you won’t find any odes to butterflies or cheesy
fairytales authored by me. My inspirations are varied; I can’t pinpoint
what defines my manically changing style. I’m definitely stirred by classic
African-American writers such as Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and Zora Neale Hurston.
I’ve also been influenced by emerging small press poets and short fiction authors. I have much to learn about writing, so I read all I can in order to notice what works (and what doesn’t).
I’m also highly impacted by music, whether it’s hip
hop, jazz, R & B, blues, or occasionally even rock. I often listen to music
while brainstorming and editing, which is in conflict with the traditional approach of working in silence. Usually I can read one of my poems or stories and recall that its “rhythm” was fostered by
the furious refrain of a Tupac song, a melancholy Miles Davis solo, or a bland guitar riff from the latest overplayed band
on the radio.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot my shameless plugs. My first fiction chapbook, Survival Notes, is forthcoming through Červená Barva Press. I will have poetry in future editions of The Arabesques Review, Cherry
Bleeds, the I-70 Review, and Prairie Poetry.
Additional propaganda can be found at http://adrianspotter.squarespace.com/.
Be
good and keep writing – a brilliant idea is just a wasted thought until you do something with it.
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Justin Gold
After four years and eight consecutive semesters of countless fiction, non-fiction, and poetry workshops at Hofstra
University, I have learned that character counts. Character development is the
fuel that drives the very best of stories, often allowing the plot to write itself in a natural manner. When combined with subtlety, a writer is limitless in his arsenal of possibilities. This is the powerful combination that I wanted to display in "Breaking Glass."
My inspirations range from the short stories of Raymond Carver, to the multi-tiered narratives of television shows
like Lost and Prison Break. In some situations, I
try to evoke the atmospheric poetics of Joseph Conrad, while other situations call for the minor subtleties of John Cheever. There is no single inspiration that has allowed me to define my own personal style. I must admit a budding fascination with the labyrinthine plots and twist endings of
fictional writers like Jeffrey Deaver and Michael Connelly.
Since graduating from Hofstra University in 2007 with a Creative
Studies degree, I have moved from my sunny home in California to pursue a writing career in New York City. There, I also play lead guitar and write lyrics for a Long Island based rock band entitled "Escape the
Skyline." Art has become my safe haven and I have yet to experience any greater
warmth than writing.
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