publicbookshelf.com

I rarely, if ever, find myself on a literary online website, but I have used bookshelf to read Sherlock Holmes stories as well as an Agatha Christie novel whose title I’ve long since forgotten. I know this website contains more novels than short stories, but those tend to be what I end up reading. I know this website also has a large collection of romance novels, and as far as I know, they are not too erotic in nature… If you’re into that sort of thing. I know the novels are separated into various categories depending on their focus, but most revolve around romantic plotlines. I don’t think people are able to post their own novels, but their collection is very large nonetheless. I doubt this is helpful, but all the same, happy reading.

I'm not a 100% this will count, but I absolutely love a site called duotrope. While it is not a literary magazine in itself, its a free writers resource listing almost 3000 different literary magazines, blogs, publishers and the like, for fiction and poetry. You can brows and search for them by type, genre, length, ect, and each one comes with statistics including how long the place generally takes in getting back to people who submit, their acceptance rates, pay rates, ect. It's an amazing resource for writers just starting out and trying to get published, especially in the poetry and short fiction market.

www.duotrope.com

The Elegant Variation

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/

"The Elegant Variation" is a literary web-blog that reviews and recommends a number note-worth works and readings. It also has an extensive collection of links to different literary blogs and small publishing websites. It is a great source if you are looking for something new and interesting to read. The creator of this blog obviously has an extensive knowledge of literature (new and old) and is very insightful when it comes to offering insight on different works.

The New Yorker

I know it's probably not very original, and it can be the snobbiest thing in publication, but The New Yorker often publishes really good short stories. It has been rare when I have read one in The New Yorker and I didn't like it. So. Yeah. I'm going old school on this.

The New Yorker

NANOWRIMO

I can't say that I read any literary magazines. I keep thinking that I should pick up the habit and try to submit, but it never seems to happen for me.

One thing I do love is NANOWRIMO! And if you've never heard of it, I totally suggest checking it out! http://www.nanowrimo.org/ Every November is National Novel Writing Month. The website is dedicated to this fun, individual contest where you try to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It's a really fun environment that encourages you to just get pen to paper and write. And if you finish (it's all based on the honor system) you get a cool certificate! I've personally never finished, but I have written a lot of really funny, genuine crap that I love.

They also have a few other contests through out the year. I believe April is about writing a script in one month.

Jason Myers

http://jasonmyersauthor.com/home.html

Website of awesome local author Jason Myers. Links to short stories as well as some random interviews. You can (and should) also buy his books here.

http://www.bookninja.com/

I like this site because they have a variety of different texts for you to read. The have sections where you can read general interest pieces and book reviews from their magazine and then read some awesome literary comics that was drawn and written by the sites creator. Another really cool feature about this site is the newslog section where you can participate in message boards to share your opinions and commentary on the links the site presents. Bookninja is also simple to navigate and has a wide variety of literature to choose from.

http://niccageaseveryone.blogspot.com/

gets me through the hard times

Poets&Writers

http://www.pw.org has excellent sources for poets and writers. They have tons of interesting articles on current issues, links to other literary magazines, information on different grants and awards, and ways to connect with other writers and poets. Their website is well organized and easy to figure out. I have benefited a lot from this source. Hope it can be helpful to some of you :)

Vanity Fair

I'm not sure if Vanity Fair would count as a literary magazine but it does have interesting articles covering business, politics, crime, society, and Hollywood. Also one can look through the slide shows. There are great photographs of actors and celebrities.

esquire

I'm not going to lie, when I first thought of a literary magazine that I follow the only site I could think of was the Onion. However, this assignment encouraged me to research more (justified?) literary sites. I came across Esquire, a magazine that I have enjoyed on my leisure time at the bookstore. I found the site well organized and easy to manuever. Most importantly, the site offers a varity of categories such as home, women, features, style, fiction, video and blogs. I would recommend people to give the site a few clicks and explore. There is a lot of great humor and interesting writing.

flatmancrooked.com

A friend of mine told me about this site a couple months ago. i don't know if it's necessarily a literary magazine online type deal, but what the people at this site do is publish anthologies of fiction/poetry by emerging authors. They've got a lot of short stories and whatnot available to view on the site, a few movie reviews, and apparently there's a poll going on to see who the hottest author under 35 is...interesting.

Literatureproject.com

I haven't been a regular reader of any online literary magazines up to this point but I stumbled upon this website that I thought was pretty cool. It has quite a few famous books that can be read for free online. They also offer a text to speech download which I think means that you're computer will read the book to you.

literatureproject.com

creative response to/online literary magazine

http://www.anderbo.com/

Anderbo for Online Short Stories, Poetry, Facts, and Photography.

I don't keep up with many online sites, but I do really enjoy McSweenys. However, Anderbo is a site that has a bunch of fiction. Short stories, poetry, "fact" stories, and photos. The stories are all around 3,500 words, so they're all pretty quick to read. The poetry is pretty, and I like a good amount of it. You can submit to them. Short stories have to be up to 3,500 words. Poetry requires up to 6 poems. Fact stories need up to 1,500 words. I found this site more recently, in the past few months, and haven't fully read through all of it, but what I have read has been cool. Not much collaboratives, but the authors are all interesting.

http://www.slope.org/

http://www.slope.org/

I love this website. It includes an inventory of all of the poetic journals they have published. Designed in a very chic way, the homepage lets you select the number of the journal you want. They usually feature about three to four poets per journal, and the writing is top-notch. It's a great website if you want to get lost in modern poetry for a while.

Gertrude Stein's frustrating style and my rendition of TENDER BUTTONS

Grumpy Flowers
The vase is too nice and it is annoying all things that breathe the dirty air in this old room. Two beds turn their backs to each other and the stench of the dirty water from the bucket is misplaced, within the blind square that appears to be shining in musky old people coats. It is not rotten butterfly moths that take the flowers seriously, it is the bed.

A Skinny Belt
Whatever is fat must dread life forever. Irritating leather makes it seem to be more. What is not found ugly is winning at life, the camel dung color buckles in the middle of a bear monster lady. Lady, missing and misplaced by the bears that love her on the bed. They would look for her if they could turn their faces. Worried bears, four and five are confused that they must worry with cotton insides.

Deodorant
Things show on your body in sudden, eerie places, like elbow nooks and toe cranny's. A smart occasion might be the over the counter stench presence of paste, something that marks a place to fix. And with fixing, comes worry and worry sweats. Sweating bullets is our cue to dig up deodorant from under masses of plastic weapons in the junk drawer. The mail man lifted his arm to knock on the door but no one watched.

*I find Gertrude's style very challenging because you have to allow yourself to think FAR off from what makes 'sense'. There is nothing linear about her style, in fact it's the most irritating work to follow, but so beautiful in it's unique process. Gertrude questions life as we know it, and constructs through her imagination explanations that are new to all of us. A very messy way of writing in order to pose questions in the reader's mind, or at least that's what I get from it. The work is challenging, but beautifully awkward. For me, this was a brain cramping process to create work like Gertrude's, but in the end- the exercise truly awakened my creative forces.

http://www.lapetitezine.org/

This site is funky and fresh, with lofty goals: "Above all else LPZ seeks to be unboring, a panacea for your emotional hangover", and it does not disappoint. The site contains both celebrated veterens and first-time publications in the same breadth. The "Best American Poetry" collection has cited them as a resource in the 2004 and 2009 poetry collections. Perhaps the coolest part of this site is that the managing editor, D.W. Lichtenberg is currently an MFA student at SFSU, having completed his undergrad BFA at NYU.

MAKEMAG.com

I stumbled upon makemag.com recently as I followed the poety Dora Malech to her credits on this website. It's set up like a blog and features a lot of new memoirs, books of poetry, fiction, art and reviews. Make is a Chicago Literary Magazine that covers the 'storyteller's city'. This website is both entertaining and informative in terms of new publications and upcoming writers. Here is the poem by Dora Malech that traced me back to makemag.com. I really enjoyed it.

Shore Ordered Ocean
Dora Malech

Bells on bridles to ready for battle.
Broke those horses and there weren’t any

horses left. Explosives in the hope chest,
Hawks waiting to be whistled off the fist.

Doused the dovecoats with gasoline.
Slipped the last dowels from the cask.

Couldn’t we call the crash a birdbath?
Couldn’t we call the coffins giftwrap?

Must have been some misunderstanding.
Shore ordered ocean but sent it back.


http://makemag.com/look/

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/

This website is edited by Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks, who are both two well-established authors, with this they have given this magazine a real shot at being considered a "big" literary magazine. This magazine manages to hold their authors creative works while still being successful. It's definitely worth checking out more than once.

Sci-Fi

www.sfsite.com

The above link goes to a Science Fiction and Fantasy website. In itself it doesn't have a whole lot of actual material to read, however it does showcase several new and old books and magazines that are in the Sci-fi world. Being a Sci-Fi buff I like this site. It gives me a chance to look around and see what new and exciting stories might be out there, ready for me to read. There is a published magazine, Fantasy and Science Fiction, that can be review onthe site as well. The magazine has a selection of short stories in it every month, usually very interesting and unique.
Jason Yelland

Peer Response Form

Peer Response Form
Note: Complete one form for each project you are responding to. Each response should be about a page long

1. Title and Author of the work:


2. What are the ambitions and intentions of this work? What are the themes? What did you take away from the piece?


3. Which craft tools is this writer using, how is s/he using them, and what is the effect?


4. What part of this work had the most impact?


5. What part of this work had the least impact?


6. Any grammar or continuity questions?


7. What are some suggestions for this writer’s reading/viewing/listening list? (Optional)

Week 12 Assignments

Workshop Preparation
Respond to the final projects from your workshop group by completing a Peer Response Form (handed out in class and posted to the blog) for each piece. Bring two copies of each response to class April 29th, one for the writer, and one for me.

Writing Assignment
CONTINUE TO WORK ON YOUR FINAL PROJECT

OPTIONAL (if you still need to turn in a an exercise)
1) Find a piece of writing (in the course reader or elsewhere) that you find difficult, frustrating, or confusing, and write your own creative response, copying as many elements as you can (form, style, tone, rhythm, development, themes, etc.)

Read for April 29
Not Knowing, Donald Barthelme
On Defamiliarization, Charles Baxter

Blog
1. Post a link to an online literary magazine you like. Give us a brief one-paragraph write up of the site’s focus, interests, and aesthetic. If the magazine features collaborative or interactive processes, so much the better!

Push Hands

This was a very insightful piece that I felt very close to. I often play a very contrary role in my classes. I have a hard time accepting things that I see flaw in, but I also know that often these 'flaws' are just mis-understandings on my part, so I frequently question and attack things thrown out before me, regardless of what it is. Unless I can see the immediate truth in it right away, I'm probably going to fight against it until that truth compels me.

Recently, which is to say this semester, I've become allot more familiar with revision. I cannot say I enjoy it any more, but its demonstrated to me how much better my work is after I've done several drafts, and in a way that is undeniable. This battle between laziness or, as skinner puts it so well 'spiritual paralysis', is a familiar one to me, and I think that this essay helped me with it.

Push Hands

I liked the revision suggestions that Skinner had. I will definitely try a few of them, including the suggestion to revisit the poem in the imagination and make a list of all the sensual images in the scene.

It was also really good to read the part about trying to move the writer's attention away from the anxiety of criticism. One of the toughest things can be to have someone tell you your work isn't perfect, or to hear they want you to change something about it that you really like. Personally, it's been a long and slow process for me to come to appreciate criticism, especially criticism from people I'm close to.

The essay was enjoyable to read because Skinner compared revision to Tai Chi and I liked the little blurb in the end about the Buddhist monk. In time I'll figure out how to deal with revision!

Push Hands response

I loved this piece. I thought it was intensely honest and spot on in describing the writing/revision experience. All writers go through this process, feeling incredibly protective over their work. They are so protective that it is often hard to revise because you don't want to get rid of something that you may have thought sounded genius while someone else thought it was pretentious or didn't fit. People are afraid to edit down their poems or stories because they hate to part from lines that they loved, but the often fail see that those lines may be slowing down the story or may belong in another piece altogether. Jeffery Skinner made a lot of fantastic points in "Push Hands: Balancing Resistance and Revision" because he is giving it to us from the perspective we understand, the perspective of being the writer or creative mind. We need to be willing to let go of certain things in order to allow ourselves to move forward and be successful. This was very insightful :)

Against Epiphanies

This piece had a lot of good points, and some that one can argue against. As writers, we are put under certain restrictions, and some of those restrictions can really take away from the quality of our writing. Baxter claims that having to always reach an epiphany to satisfy the common reader, can get a bit repetitive. He calls it the "old insight train", which comes "chugging into the station, time after time. I really do agree with a lot of points he is making. A lot of great stories I have read, did not include noticeable climaxes or the writers' insights, and they were still great for different reasons. I think soon enough we will all get tired of the same old point of epiphany in our stories, and look for something new to engage our readers in.
Baxter says that "stories can arrive somewhere interesting without claiming any wisdom or clarification", and I find that very comforting. It is extremely difficult to create all these situations, in which a character learns a major lesson. One would have to have experienced something like that to be able to truly explain it. I think, overall, Baxter makes really good points. I enjoyed reading this much more than the revision piece.

Sleeping with the Dictionary

I guess it's just me, but I didn't get most of the poems in Sleeping with the Dictionary. While there were individual lines in them that I liked because of the way they sounded, overall I wasn't able to get into them. Coo/Slur was the only poem that I specifically liked, yet I have no idea what it was talking about. I found the poems hard to read, yet I like the idea behind them and the use of language.

I am left: unsettled.

PUsh

Like most that have already posted about push I found it highly relate-able and particularly helpful. The feelings he brings up about proofreading was spot on with how I feel, especially when he mentioned laziness. I often get the feeling that I don't want to write or revise something because its not going to be great or because its not entirely original. After reading this I will definitely keep the tips he mentions in mind when writing or revising, especially for the final project for this class.

apologies for the late post the internet was not my friend

Sleeping With The Dictionary Response

Mullen definitely displays her intense love of the English language and her dictionary throughout her entire book. Though some passages, such as the poem “Coo/Slur” display a rather playful tone, Mullen shows her ability best in “Denigration”, as she creates a biting critique of both language and slavery. Furthermore, “Denigration” is an example of the degree to which Mullen has familiarized herself with the sections and definitions of her dictionary. Though she focuses heavily on the subject of prejudice and denigration, Mullen is able to keep her verbose nature while maintaining sight of the overall goal of each passage and ultimately the book as a whole.

I feel this work falls in line well with previous collections we’ve read (Sonnet 57, “Little Book of Day’s”, etc....) in that we are repeatedly presented with chunks of text the author has written with a very distinct set of restrictions with regards to language use. Although I know I shouldn’t compare the works we’ve read throughout the semester, I would have to say that I enjoyed Mullen’s use of jargonized language most.

Push Hands

Jeffery Skinner's Push Hands is a great list of advice and techniques in that it is not a list of advice and techniques. As others have mentioned, there are lists and lists published by writers, even books completely dedicated to the idea that the author has the answers and components to good writing, good revising, and a successful career. However, I enjoy Skinner's Push Hands because of the influence from tai chi that he compares with revision in literature. Tai chi focuses on meditation and peace, and is a medium through which we can perceive the worlds events, both individually and collectively, outside of it's use in martial arts. A martial art based on calmness and the relaxation of mind and body in dealing with outside forces. In the case of Skinners essay, tai chi applies to the relaxation of mind and body in dealing with outside forces, those who ask the writer to revisit and revise the writing. This comparison is very effective, and is a great way to explain a technique that not only can help a writer succeed, but can help them fail too. Skinner's ability to understand that revision and writing come hand in hand, and can take you to the figurative and literal "mat" of revising and writing really give a writer the sense of calm they may need to gently push hands with their writing, their readers, their teachers, and themselves.

Sleeping With The Dictionary

What made Sleeping With The Dictionary especially interesting for me was it's way of following a trend, yet being so very unique. Some aspects of it can easily be compared to Sonnet Fifty-Six. Especially obvious are the portions (such as Dim Lady and Variations on a Theme Park) which are based on Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. Yet, intriguingly, Mullen's changes effect the exact opposite of Hoover's changes; Hoover changes altered the form and retained the meaning while Mullen retained the form to change the meaning completely. Aside from Shakespeare, much of the poetry in both texts involves finding different words and forms to add extra or underlying meaning. Here, issues such as race and dialect were invoked with a few well-placed word-changes. Sleeping With the Dictionary exhibited a fascinating sort of word-play that made me reflect on how much can change with only a few different words.

Push Hands: Balancing Resistance and Revision

I thought this piece was something every writer should read. Skinner has found a way to communicate all the comments I have ever received from an English teacher into something that is comprehensible. Grammar has always been something I found confining. Even to this day I have difficulties putting my creative thoughts into specific structures. Skinner shows that revising one’s work truly helps a writer understand their work. Athough we would all like to think that our ideas are organically ready for the world, Skinner shows that revising is what makes a writer greater. This piece encouraged me to embrace revision, rather than fear it. However, I thought it was important that he still mentioned how some advice can certainly be bad advice. Overall, I think Skinner’s argument for revision holds true. Resistance is not an uncommon feeling, but should be taken with a grain of salt.

Sleeping with Electricities

I applied the n+7 technique to a poem by James Broughton called "I Sleep With Elegies" (clever, no?).

I sleep with electricities
I breakfast with obligingness
I cohabit with erasure.
Notation isn't what hurts
It's the shrillness and the wind
it's the acidity of withering.
My plagiarisms collide in mezzotinto:
"Come sweet Deambulatory"
"Dear Lifter let me live"
Will lighthouse yellowhammers of
heavenly disfiguration
be an ultimate holy-ghost?
"Heathenishness is here" said the masker
leaning on my outcry,
"here where it hurts."

Pushin' dem Hands

Push Hands is fascinating. I found it especially interesting simply because I have experience in the titular tai chi exercise itself. I never in my life would have equated it to something like writing, but after reading this short essay, I can totally see where Jeffrey Skinner is coming from when he makes the analogy. A lot of writing is about anticipation, just like the game of push hands. Oftentimes we let what we are thinking about in our mind affect how or when or even if we are going to be writing. We may or may not convince ourselves that we are capable of something, or we think to much about what we are doing and, in turn, end up ruining a really great idea. The same goes for the tai chi exercise. A lot of the flow of the game comes from just feeling, and not thinking too much. If you push too hard or too little, you are done for. Your move, just like your writing has to come from the heart. You can’t get caught up so much in your mind. OF course what you think is essential to your writing, but I’d say really great writing is mostly power of the heart over power of the brain. If your heart isn’t in it, then why even bother?

Resistance and Revision

I liked this article well enough. It was written well and in a quiet humor, colloquial style. But I don't think I found it very helpful. The resistance to revision is a well-known fact about writing, especially student writers. I thought Skinner did a funny job qualifying it: making jokes on the student who believes in the "organic" poem and the "realness of voice" etc. These sections were funny. And they put a little light to the subject. But this is a subject we're already plenty familiar with. Towards the very end he gives suggestions for tackling revision, which I think is the closest this article came to being helpful. When he gives specific techniques to use or try, I think some of them are useful, but he wrote directed at poetry writers, and some of the suggested techniques are too narrow to apply to fiction.

Sleeping with the dictionary

Mullen wasn't kidding when she said she'd been licked all over by the English tongue. Her wildly creative and punctual pieces help prove the point that sleeping with the dictionary, however damaging it may be to one's self-esteem, does have its perks. European Folk Tale Variant is a good example of this. It reads more like a police report written by someone with too much time on their hands than a re-telling of Goldilocks and the three bears, and the way that Mullen takes the fantasy out of the fairy tale while still keeping the piece enjoyable and alive is a feat within itself.

Against "Against Epiphanies" (But Not Really)

Charles Baxter’s “Against Epiphanies” infuriated me. This is in part because I vehemently disagree with his thesis and in part because I can’t deny the truth of what he’s saying, a paradoxical predicament. Epiphanies are my modus operandi. It’s how I get through day-to-day life. That overwhelming sense of awakening when you strike upon an insight that has crawled to the surface from some innate place inside you is majestic. So much of my discovery of self has been brought about in this fashion. Baxter puts a lot of emphasis on the end result of these epiphanies demanding that they lead to a final destination that is either true or false, and I think there is an error in this line of thinking as it forsakes the process of discovery. In regards to his own epiphanies, Baxter claims, “They have arrived with a powerful, soul-altering force; and they have all been dead wrong.” Though they may be wrong in the end, insights still take you through the process of discovery, and besides truth is time-dependent as it is. Just because something once seemed undeniable, doesn’t mean that its truth won’t change with time. Keeping the discovery process open without clinging to the end results is one of the healthiest means of exploration.

I also think his argument that, “a belief that one is a victim will lead inevitably to an obsession with insight” is somewhat circular. Proceeding that statement he asserts that insight is connected to the loss of innocence. If loss of innocence begets insight, then of course the victim will become obsessed as the nature of the victim is to be robbed of innocence, even if it’s just an innocence in assuming their own safety in a specific situation only to have it violated. Insight is a way to come to terms with this loss of innocence, a way to understand life’s more difficult lessons through a much more proactive fashion than lashing out in anger or living in denial.

I do however think epiphanies are abused. Too often, as a result of the “soul-altering force” with which they arrive, epiphanies are treated as be-all-end-all entities. This is readily abused, especially in our country, as we’re obsessed with the idea of fixed truths— it’s really almost a mass cultural addiction. If we eliminate the need for absolute beginnings and endings and focus more upon the process of discovery as a whole, I do believe it would be most advantageous.

I really liked this reading. It played devil’s advocate to my devil’s advocate.

Balancing Resistance and Revision

Jeffrey Skinners essay was not what I had originally expected. The way in which he writes is descriptive and thorough, but he ties the practice of writing to the mental state of the writer. That is, this essay is not merely a series of helpful tips for the writer to consider. Its not a "to do when revising" list as many authors have published in the past, there are books and books claiming to be the universal guide to writing. Skinner seems to asses this problem on a much more personal level. The idea of resistance is not something that I had associated with the process of revision before reading this essay. After reading it I see that the two come hand in hand, and productive revision is in fact a balance between the two. As a writer i feel like my resistance comes out of a combination of insecurity and unmotivated laziness. I do feel a resistance when revisiting my work because often I feel exactly as Skinner put it, that my first drafts are always "promising" and if I go back to it it will gradually get worse. The specific tactics he lists near the end of the essay I found engaging as well. I had never thought to revisit a piece like you were "addressing the poem to a friend you haven't seen in years". This would really hope to bring out the meaning of a poem. Because you would understand a friends point of views its like aquring a concrete outside perspective on your work. I think I might use this in my up-coming revisions :)

Push Hands Response

This piece really reminded me that revision is an essential part to all writing processes. It also reminded how I can be a lazy writer sometimes whom thinks that his first drafts are always his best. Skinner also emphasized that every writer is different and will neede too concentrate on different parts of the writing development process than others do. I particularly liked how he described the two different types of lazniess, it was humorous but at the same time really true! When I ask my friends and family to proof read the things I write, I am almost always self-conscious about what they will think about it. Sometimes it gets to the point where I will not ask anyone to read it because I think they won't like it. In that regard, the piece that Skinner wrote helped me to deal with that complex. As he said, "Writing is Revision" and I fully believe that. This piece was a useful reminder to me that revision is important because you can always build upon your work, making it that ,much better and taking my writing to the next level. Skinner knows the writing process and since he is so experienced in the field his advice should be taken.

SwiththeD

The selected 'poems' in SwiththeD all have a flavor their own. Mirror from the daily creative accounts for Little Book Of Days, these individual pieces have an odd layout. None of them seem to corrolate with the other, subject wise, creating an abrupt switch from one to the other. However, there were some interesing line I found quite illuminating. "my scruptious Twinkie has as much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who's hyped beyond belief." I have related to this idea. Taking the simplier action can sometimes be the better. "Our story unwinds with the curious dynamic of an action flick without a white protagonist." Don't know what to say really about this line, it just struck me to be humorous. Being an advid Disneyland freaK I found the piece 'Variations on a Theme Park' most interesting. It made me think of the meandering of society for the joy of pleasure, without ever really knowing what to look for.

Jason Yelland

N+7 for a passage in The Hour of the Star

This is my attempt at using the n+7 technique in a passage from the book, The Hour of the Star

She found consolation in being sad. Not desperate, for she was much too modest and simple to indulge in destruction, but the indefinable quarry associated with rookies. It goes without saying that she was a newsagent. News sustained her. Debauch Godson, news counted for something: almost as good as cuckolds. Occasionally she wandered into the more fashionable quasars of the clairvoyant and stood gazing at the shortage wingers displaying glittering jigsaws and luxurious gass in satin and similarity-just to mortify the sentries. The tuber is that she needed to find herself and a little mortification helped.

Push Hands

This piece by Skinner couldn’t have come at a better time. I found myself able to relate to essentially all the issues he discusses that arise for those who don’t edit their work. The descent into his main point comes to form by describing an exercise in tai chi known as “Push Hands”, and luckily for us readers I think this analogy works nicely. Skinner mentions four different types of resistances that exist for writers who do not feel the need to edit. I unfortunately was able to relate to all. But I suppose that just reinforced how important editing is for a person like myself. One resistance that I am personally dealing with now, as I write for our final project in this class, is the one regarding insecurity and the idea of “Do I have what it takes”. Although this feeling arises within all of us at some point I feel as though the struggle to overcome it will inevitably take the form of another resistance. Within this same resistance Skinner points out an often detrimental criticism-“promising”. This is definitely a situation I know well. Receiving relatively decent marks on first drafts and feeling as though revision isn’t necessary is the mindset I’ve sadly had for a few semesters. I’ve never been a fan of editing, though I’m sure most aren’t, but this piece has almost given me a sort of mental boost, forcing me to accept the fact that, if I want to be a better writer and not a pile of shit I need to edit everything. So edit I will, in hopes of avoiding a future of feces.