Writer’s Workshops: Under the Black Flag
- At August 10, 2014
- By Bob Howe
- In News
0
My essay, “Writer’s Workshops: Under the Black Flag,” is live at Black Gate.
Our class t-shirt, Clarion ’85. Image courtesy of Bill Shunn.
I actually once said to a fellow writer, “The best thing you could do for art is cut off your hands and bury your typewriter.”
Beyond the words themselves, it’s hard to know what’s worse about this: that I said it to someone I’m sure I liked or that I can’t remember to whom I said it.
I know it was at the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in the summer of 1985, then held at Michigan State University in East Lansing. I knew it was someone I liked, because I liked every one of my fellow workshoppers. As I got to know the 16 other participants, I felt these are my people!
The context for the remark was a workshop session. For those unfamiliar with the format, everyone in the workshop delivers an oral critique of a manuscript handed out — and one hopes, read — in advance, then the author responds. Clarion workshops are machines for producing pithy one-liners — often put downs — the best (worst?) of which are memorialized on tee-shirts printed in the last week or two of the workshop. [More]
IGMS Reader’s Choice Award
- At June 05, 2014
- By Bob Howe
- In Fiction, News
- 0
“Fantastic Landscape” – used with permission from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artwork by Francesco Guardi
You can read the story in IGMS #33.
It’s humbling when I think of the other works they published that year. Thanks to Edmund Schubert who published the story, and all the readers who voted for it.
Writing News
- At November 16, 2009
- By Bob Howe
- In Fiction, News
- 12
I’m very happy to post that my novella, “The Natural History of Calamity,” will appear in issue 14 of Black Gate.
Here’s a sample…
I took the Will Charbonneau case on the same day an exceedingly creepy ex-boyfriend reentered my life. The way the case played out, and the reason the pinhead smashed back into my life, were intimately related. It would have saved me no end of trouble if I’d known that from the start.
I’m on the phone with my mother. “So are you seeing anybody?” she asks.
Coming from my mother that’s not a question, it’s a deep pit full of scorpions and irritable cobras. From her second generation, Italian-American perspective, the way my 34-year-old uterus was going unused was a disaster on a par with Frank Sinatra’s death.
“Ma,” I say, in the Universal Warning Tone, “Don’t start.”
“I was just asking,” she says, in the Universal Wounded Tone. “I wanted to know if you were bringing someone to Brenda’s wedding.”
That would be my cousin Brenda, who at the advanced age of twenty-three is marrying a Port Authority cop she met while getting a ticket for drinking Stoli on the PATH train. I’m saved from the pit by Gerald, my secretary, who sticks his head around the corner of my door.
“Someone to see you,” he mouths.
I nod and held up one finger.
“Gotta go, Ma, business,” I say.
