Guest blogger, Gail Dines When people ask about my occupation, my answer is usually a conversation stopper. They do not expect to hear that I research porn, and, after the inevitable jokes, most people are actually fascinated to hear what I have to say about the harms of porn. Of course, not everybody agrees with [...]
Welcome to this week’s featured writing prompt. Create a piece (short story, poem, etc.) inspired by this excerpt from the poem Loba: Parts I-VIII by Diana DiPrima: “like pearls in the road she dances” Enjoy! and don’t forget to post your finished work in the comments section (optional).
Guest blogger, Marissa Matarazzo In February of this year, my first book, a collection of short stories titled Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums was published. The stories are all connected. The connectedness happened first by accident. And I thought I’d made an idiot mistake. Eventually things got better. I wrote the bulk of [...]
Guest blogger, Zetta Elliott In the past, when I taught my course “Gender, Terror, and Trauma in African American Culture,” I urged my students to consider this problem: how can we study representations of trauma when trauma resists representation? How do writers find the words to describe unspeakable acts of violence, and how can artists [...]
Guest blogger, Melanie Sumner Over the summer I asked students in my online creative writing course to post blog entries about “hidden agendas” in their writing. These were graduate students writing fiction and creative nonfiction, and I was surprised at the number of them who claimed they wrote for entertainment and informational purposes only. Aside [...]
Welcome to this week’s featured writing prompt. Write a piece incorporating the words pearl onions, slingback heels and blue hydrangeas. Enjoy! and don’t forget to post your finished work in the comments section (optional).
Guest blogger, Ilie Ruby You’ve waited your whole life for this to happen. And now it’s finally here: the publication of your debut novel. You have given up everything for this book—men, jobs, nights out with the girls. You worked so damn hard on it—almost ten years, but you know that a lot of people [...]
Guest blogger, Irene Ziegler I grew up on Lake Byron in DeLand, Florida where my journey as a writer began. Both my books are set there. My father was an avid fisherman, and gave me my first tackle box when I was six. He was also a man who respected water, and because my sisters [...]
Guest blogger, Alison Mandaville “I don’t think they understand what you mean by ‘fiction’,” whispered Melida Tuzunoglu, an up-and coming Turkish writer and my partner in offering this workshop, as the roomful of attentive women dissolved into half a dozen contesting conversations in Azerbaijani about my writing exercise instructions: Create three fictional characters that might [...]
Welcome to this week’s featured writing prompt. Enjoy! and don’t forget to post your finished work in the comments section (optional).
Lauren Sardi interviews Patricia Leavy, feminist sociology professor and author. Leavy has become known for advocating innovative and artful approaches to conducting social research as a means of getting at the complexity of lived experience and linking the “inner worlds” of women to the social contexts in which they live.
Heidi W. Durrow discusses her novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky—winner of the 2008 Bellwether Prize for Fiction.
It is hard not to believe we’re in a time of empowerment of those less powerful, and to be swept up in the fervor escalating the world over. In 2011, we witnessed the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street protests and most recently, one of the largest protests of women in Egypt’s long history against the [...]
Caroline Palmer looks at the motivations of Minneapolis-based choreographer Ananya Chatterjea and the work of Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT).
Natsuo Kirino’s novels are not for the faint-hearted, nor are they for westerners loath to abandon the cultural stereotype of the Japanese woman as a delicate and beautiful “oriental flower”. Wendy Nakanishi explores the role of women in Japanese culture and society through Kirino’s popular works of crime and suspense.
