Weekly Writing Prompt #6

Welcome to this week’s featured writing prompt. Enjoy! and don’t forget to post your finished work in the comments section (optional).

Blogging with Squarespace: Drag and Drop Simple!

Guest blogger, Hannah Eason

I recently changed blogging platforms, moving my website, Hometown Grotesque, to Squarespace. For me, the transition sounded alluring after I read a complimentary description of it from Debbie Ridpath Ohi, who runs Inkygirl.com. Drawn in by descriptions of its highly customizable format, and Squarespace’s 14-day trial period, I tried it out. Here’s what I’ve found impressive so far:

Customization: Swapping your template, along with column arrangement and width, banner style, “active” and “hover” colors and basically any other element you could wish to personalize, is a piece of cake. In addition, you can drag and drop individual elements when in “configuration” mode or “architecture,” the latter of which offers a more simplified overview of your site elements.

Easy Integration of Third-Party Apps: With my latest bygone blogging platform, WordPress, every change I attempted consumed far more time than comparable changes with Squarespace.

With Squarespace, I easily integrated a “Donate” feature from PayPal, a “Submit” widget from StumbleUpon, as well as multiple subscription forms for the third-party service FeedBurner. Unlike my experiences with previous platforms, these installations on Squarespace did not involve error messages or piecemeal widgets displayed on my page, and I did not have to go through HTML codes with a fine-toothed comb hoping to find some mysterious offender.

Speaking of subscription forms: I opted for FeedBurner syndication for email subscriptions because this is a feature Squarespace does not personally host (they do host syndication for feed readers). I experienced no complication whatsoever, even in opting for page-specific subscription forms and a total-package subscription form as well. Which brings me to my next point …

Page Specific Customization: Squarespace doesn’t hold the patent on allowing certain widgets, text blocks, tag clouds, etc. on one page and no others, but they make it incredibly easy. With my personal website, I had wanted, for quite some time, to separate my (disparate) blogging interests into journals and offer, for each journal, email and RSS subscription links, as well as category and tag lists. Being one of these people who is all but intravenously connected to the internet for work purposes yet doesn’t have the stamina for slogging through lengthy mark-up codes hoping, by trial-and-error, to effect the result I need, I was hesitant to attempt such a journal-separating project. I could envision things going poorly enough to demand a total blog do-over.

This is where the seamless architecture of Squarespace was of the greatest benefit to me. Customizing pages (and thereby including all needed information over the course of your website without making any single page look cluttered) is every bit as simple as site customization, which is to say: drag-and-drop simple.

Promotion: It stands to reason that one main focus of writers who blog is to promote their work, reaching a wide yield of new readers. In this area, I’ve also been pleased with Squarespace. They come automatically geared to ping and crawl and latch onto SEO terms, and they also have an internal analytics system (so you can see how well these automated promotion methods work) which is more detailed than those I’ve experienced before. One of the analytical tools allows you to see the referrers of your visitors; I’ve been gratified to discover that Squarespace itself is frequently listed as a referring source.

Price: Squarespace is a paid website platform, but one which is well worth the benefits, in my opinion. There are five different prepackaged options you can choose from according to factors such as how much storage you need, your number of contributing editors, custom audiences, per-page style sheets and so on. Packages start at $8 and range up to $50. Another nice feature of Squarespace is that you have the option of customizing your blogging package to a certain degree. On top of your basic plan, you can choose additional storage, bandwidth and audiences for a fixed price (one dollar per extra gigabyte for storage and bandwidth, two dollars per additional audience.)

In my experience with Squarespace thus far, I’ve found it to be the ideal platform for writers like myself: those of us who do rely on blogging as an important mechanism but don’t have time to become on-the-side website design experts. To experience so many customization options – which are as quarrelsome as Legos are a pain to stack – is refreshing, not to mention time-saving. For any issues which do arise, Squarespace has a highly responsive customer support team. I had to email the support team once, and I received a personal response within, I would say, twenty minutes. They also have a robust help section already in place which promptly nixed most of my questions (this help section includes detailed FAQs as well as tutorial videos.)

For anyone interested in trying Squarespace, they do offer the aforementioned 14-day free trial period (which requires no credit card.) For anyone who has an existing blog and considers switching to this platform: I found their blog import system to be quick and simple.

So why use Squarespace? I think their website says it best: “You can build it 10X faster on our comprehensive platform. Seriously.”

They mean it.

www.Squarespace.com

In addition to writing UpClose interviews and book reviews for Her Circle Ezine, Hannah Eason writes fiction under the name Jane Eisenhart. Links to her short stories and additional writing can be found on her website: http://hometowngrotesque.squarespace.com/.

Writing as an Exile

Guest blogger, Sarah Wetzel

I want to talk about exile, about how exile, though chosen in my case, can prove a source of inspiration and an impetus for writing. The Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky wrote: “One more truth about the condition we call exile is that it accelerates tremendously one’s otherwise professional flight—or drift—into isolation, into an absolute perspective: into the condition in which all one is left with is oneself and one’s own language, with nobody or nothing in between.”

While Brodsky’s words highlight the isolation that often results from expatriate living, it also hints at its potential as catalyst for creativity. That is why so many stories and poems occur when writers are far from the places they call home. Think of Ovid and Dante. Think of Elizabeth Bishop and James Joyce. The estrangement of waking up in another land surrounded by people whose culture, language, experiences differ from our own ignites the imagination. This makes sense to me. In study after study, when we free-associate, we turn out to be not very free. For instance, if someone says to us “blue,” chances are that our first answers will be “sky” or “ocean.” The reason for this is simple: Our associations are shaped by language, and language is full of clichés.

For six years, I’ve lived in Israel, representing for me another culture, another language, another religion. Daily there is discomfort as well as surprise. Daily I am forced to consider things from different perspectives. Certainly since being here, I’ve reconsidered the meaning of “blue.” Blue has become an interior color of mosques, the edging of the Jewish prayer shawl called Tallit, the word kakhol in Hebrew, which sounds to me like charcoal in English or kohel in Hebrew meaning spirit. Meanwhile, say “sky” to me, and I’ll probably come back with “Negev desert,” or “Cairo,” or “grit in my teeth,” because the Israeli sky is often diffused through a film of sand. In fact, not only have I gained new perspectives, but new vocabulary.

That’s not to say that physical dislocation is the only source of inspiration. I think emotional and imaginative dislocations can emerge from a multitude of sources–a museum can be a catalyst, a lecture by someone whose views are different than one’s own, a conversation with a total stranger can be a catalyst, or even walking through parts of one’s own city never before visited. Strangers can say such strange things! As Richard Hugo writes in “Triggering Town:” “The Poem is always your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.” Sometimes it only takes a stranger, a bit of estrangement, and we are transported.

Of course, mere geographic dislocation doesn’t necessarily lead to originality. I admit I’ve written quite a few poems about Israel decorated with stone courtyards and flocks of sparrows, colorful Jerusalem characters, war poems peopled by stock terrorists and grieving mothers. Clichés exist for a reason. We say “sky” when someone says “blue” because it often is. Yet attempting to go behind the stone courtyard to absorb the sound of another language, observe how particular people live and love, has changed how I encounter my own life. Isolating, yes. Frightening, at times. Enlivening, always.

Sarah Wetzel, poet, essayist, and engineer, is the author of Bathsheba Transatlantic which won the 2009 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and will be published by Anhinga Press in Fall 2010. A daughter of the American South, Sarah somehow ended up in Israel after job-hopping across Europe. She graduated from Georgia Tech in 1989, and in 1997, received a MBA from Berkeley. Sarah completed a MFA from Bennington College in January 2009. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in Barrow Street, Valparaiso, Quiddity, Rattle, Pedestal, Stirring, Folly, TwoReview, Shampoo, and others. Sarah divides time between Israel and Manhattan, where she lives with her husband and one needy dog. www.strangelandpoems.blogspot.com

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Q&A with Isla Morley, author of ‘Come Sunday’

Synopsis: Abbe is a restless young mother living on the outskirts of Honolulu with her husband, Greg, the pastor at a small church. Their lives are suddenly riven by tragedy when their three-year-old daughter, Cleo, is struck and killed by car. As Greg turns to God and community for comfort, Abbe turns inward and reflects upon her own troubled past. Isla Morley brilliantly weaves the story of Abbe’s grief with a gripping tale of her tempestuous childhood in apartheid South Africa—and how Abbe’s father, a villainous drunk, held her family hostage for decades with his rage, until they finally began to plot their escape from him. Come Sunday is a spellbinding drama about a woman breaking free of her grief and of her past, and what it takes to revive hope when all seems lost.

Q: The story in Come Sunday revolves around the main character, Abbe’s, experience of two emotionally charged, traumatic life events: The death of her child, and her memory of growing up among domestic violence. How did you envision the relationship between these two experiences?

A: Like many of us, Abbe covered up her past pain and trauma, and hoped that things would straighten themselves out, given time. But beneath the wallpaper the cracks were still there, some of them threatening the structural integrity. When her daughter is killed, it is not just this loss Abbe must face, but also the loss of her own youth. Personal tragedy erases the timeline so that she is at once a young mother and a young girl, each having to fight an enormous battle. At the same time, she hears both the ghostly song of her deceased daughter and the hushed whispers of a long-ago murder.

I can’t say I planned to tie the present tragedy to the drama of the last summer of her youth. But whenever I tuned to the frequency of Abbe’s inner conversations, and to those she had with her husband, I kept hearing the belligerent voice of her father and the acquiescent tone of her mother. It was only when much of the book was written, that I went back and realized the lesson: the past is like the buckets African women carry on their heads – there comes a time when they have to be emptied. The walk then becomes a little easier.

Q: The death of one’s child is commonly spoken of as one of the most difficult and confusing moments for a parent, one impossible for outsiders to comprehend. How difficult was it to capture this sense of grief, and what sources were you able to call on in developing your characters?

Part of capturing this kind of grief was imagining myself, also the mother of a young child, in Abbe’s situation. And part of it was dealing with a character who holds nothing back. The difficulty for me was writing scenes where Abbe shattered what was expected of her. I sometimes wanted her to be a little “nicer,” but this is a woman who is on a ledge, who isn’t interested in being nice. And it’s because her grief pushes her past the commonplace that she has a chance at making the really big decisions, and finding hope and meaning.

Some of the characters were inspired by people I know or ended up being composites of people I’ve met. Some – like Abbe – just showed up.

Q: The whole concept of faith is an emotionally charged topic. Did you have any concerns about taking on this sensitive issue? Was there ever a moment where it just seemed too large and difficult an undertaking? And if so, how were you able to move beyond it?

A: I didn’t think about any of these things when I was writing the story. Faith and belief and doubt are all part of the mix along with love and marriage and friendship. To me, it was just natural to fold them all together; it’s part of my makeup. And yes, faith is an emotionally-charged subject, as it should be. Tepid: ugh!

When the book was finished, I wondered whether certain Christian groups would have a problem with Abbe’s struggle with God. As it turns out, both Evangelicals and liberal Christians have resonated with it, as have those who aren’t religious. Perhaps this has to do with all knowing what it is like to walk through the valley of the shadow.

I did worry about getting a publisher, though. In fact, a writer friend of mine asked me to consider deleting all the spiritual references in order to increase the odds. But I kept thinking Abbe’s issues with faith are the same issues that many of us face. The main thing was to keep her struggle authentic. And this turned out to be the same opinion as my publisher.

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from reading this novel?

A: Suffering is transformative and redemptive. The crisis that undoes you becomes the twine that stitches you back together again. A different you, yes, and maybe a little less neat around the edges. But someone real, and deep, and powerful. At the center of that power is the capacity to forgive. If we can forgive others, if we can forgive ourselves, we can do anything.

-m.k. ericson

Isla Morley grew up in South Africa during apartheid, the child of a British father and fourth-generation South African mother. During the country’s State of Emergency, she graduated from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth with a degree in English Literature. By 1994 she was one of the youngest magazine editors in South Africa, but left career, country and kin when she married an American and moved to California. For more than a decade she pursued a career in non-profit work, focusing on the needs of women and children. She has lived in some of the most culturally diverse places of the world, including Johannesburg, London and Honolulu. Now in the Los Angeles area, she shares a home with her husband, daughter, two cats, a dog and a tortoise. www.islamorley.com

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Weekly Writing Prompt #5

Welcome to this week’s featured writing prompt. Enjoy! and don’t forget to post your finished work in the comments section (optional).

My Elementary-School-Aged Brain

Guest blogger, Anne Greenawalt

Starting at age three, I used to sit on my mom or dad’s lap in front of the computer and dictate stories to them to type for me. A few years later, with some guidance on spelling and grammar, I learned to write my own stories. While helping my parents prepare for a garage sale this summer, I rediscovered these stories in their basement where they have been well-preserved for the past 20+ years.

I wrote about sporty girls who lived alone in the woods, and about playing Ninja Turtles at recess – complete with drawings of female Ninja Turtles wearing pink and yellow ribbons—and about a “house with many doors.”

I blush with embarrassment at the silly things I wrote, but more often than not I think, wow, where did that idea come from? I would love to sit down with my elementary-school-aged self and ask this question. At that time, I wasn’t concerned with publication; I just loved to write, so I did.

I always believed that if I wrote a really great story and pitched it to an editor who liked it, I would be a published writer one day. I believed the publisher would take care of all the marketing and promotions. I believed I could live comfortably for many years off the publication of one book. I believed that all I needed to be a writer was the passion and the knack for writing. I believed many things that are slowly revealing themselves to me as myths of the writing profession.

I don’t fault myself for this naivety. I can’t be expected to know everything about the writing business all at once, and if I did, it would take the fun out of the process. As a child, I didn’t suddenly know how to write one day. It was a gradual, trial and error process I developed with the help of my parents and teachers.

Learning about the business of writing is also a trial and error process that requires the help of many outside sources. I subscribe to writing magazines, attend writing workshops and conferences, and speak to as many writers as possible about their experiences and I enjoy every minute of it. The main lesson I’ve learned through these resources is this: writing isn’t the only skill writers need to be successful these days, but it is still the most important. There is no substitute for great writing.

Although I have had some short stories and magazine articles published, I will not feel like I’ve met my writing goals until a traditional publishing company picks up one of my novels, and I am working towards that. Until then, I am enjoying the process of writing and the process of learning about the profession. I enjoy the multi-faceted steps of becoming a published writer, but I do often take a step back and remind myself to tap into my elementary-school-aged brain and remember what it was like to love writing just for the sake of writing.

Anne Greenawalt graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. In 2008, she was runner-up in a short story collection competition, which resulted in the publication of her collection Growing Up Girl. She now lives in her hometown in Pennsylvania. More information on Anne and her writing can be found at www.annegreenawalt.com.

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Q&A with Susie Orbach, author of “Bodies”

Author and activist Susie Orbach shares some quick thoughts on the beauty debate.

The Writer’s Life: Thirty one years after the publication of Fat is A Feminist Issue, you released Bodies. Whilst Fifi dealt with women’s eating problems, Bodies explores the effect that the pharmaceutical industries and the media are having on our body image. What originally influenced you to write about our relationship with food and the media’s obsession with the female form? Is the pressure to conform to a generic body ideal something you have been a victim of yourself?

Susie Orbach: Mmm. When I first started thinking about this all those years back, I wouldn’t have had the words to describe what it was I was a victim of. I simply followed what I thought it meant to be a grown up woman – being caught up with dieting and body size. I did not think there was a political dimension to it or that the fact that I used to start a diet on a Monday was part of a whole social phenomenon. By today’s standards my eating then would be considered very normal. That shows how far we have come from eating in response to hunger.

WL: How would you describe the difference in what is considered the beautiful body aesthetic today, or the desire to obtain it, compared to what it was at the time of writing and publishing your first book, Fifi?

SO: The beauty ideal has become democratized today so that we are all encouraged to see beauty as absolutely essential to who we are and what we might want to do. When I wrote Fifi, it was a preoccupation that lasted a few years and did not affect every single woman. It started later. In my school maybe one in 20 girls were interested in fashion, make up, and style – and that was from age 14. Now girls as young as six up until women in old age homes are fretting about their appearance. It would be hard to take a junior high school or high school class and not notice body criticism as rife. As the idea of beauty for everyone has spread, so that ideal has narrowed and the look – at present, long thin straight hair, big boobs – has become intensified. A third point is that we seem to be exporting beauty terror around the world so that we are losing variety in what constitutes beauty and replacing it with the current western notion.

WL: The diet industry and this business of body modification appears to have grown drastically since the publication of Fifi, over thirty years ago. The over the counter diet pill, Alli, and popularity of cosmetic surgery are examples of this. Where can you see these industries heading over the next thirty years and what can we do about it?

SO: Yes. We really have to take them on. They are part of the problem often rather than part of the solution. The research shows that people gain weight after dieting, especially repetitive dieting. I say we need to insist they publish their failure rate (97%). They need to carry a warning and probably in some case prosecuted for false advertising.

WL: How do the people involved in the diet industry and those members of the media who treat eating disorders as a badge of honour, almost, react to your views?

SO: Not sure!

WL: Will fat always be a feminist issue?

SO: There will always be a way that looking through the lens of gender inequality – whether that is around femininities or masculinities – we will find interesting things to observe, understand, and theorize!

- Laura Cude

Susie Orbach is the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre in London and New York. A former Guardian (UK) columnist, she was visiting professor for ten years at the London School of Economics and is the convener of www.any-body.org. She is a consultant and co-originator of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. The author of a number of books, including On Eating, The Impossibility of Sex, and the bestseller Fat is a Feminist Issue, she lectures extensively worldwide.

Buy the book Amazon | Amazon UK

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

The Best Literature is Far More Than Any Journalism

Guest blogger, Naseem Rakha

“The best literature is far more than any journalism.” -William Faulkner

At a few minutes after midnight on September 9th, 1996, I was standing on the grounds of the Oregon State Penitentiary recording a group of revelers celebrate the execution of condemned killer Douglas Write. He was the first man to die by lethal injection in Oregon, and his execution was the first to be held in the state in more than thirty years. I was a reporter for public radio, and my assignment was to tell the story of that execution for NPR the following morning. But as I stood there, the orange lights of the prison reflecting on the low lying Pacific clouds, I knew whatever story I told the following day would be a paltry representation of what actually occurred that night, and all the preceding nights that led to Write’s execution. And I told myself that one day I would tell the fuller story.

Nine years and much research later, I began to write my first novel, The Crying Tree.

Fiction, I decided, would accomplish what I could not on that cloudy night in September: create a world for my audience to step into, experience, and feel. It could pose the deep philosophical, moral, spiritual, and social questions that come from crime and punishment. It could give people characters to hold onto, eyes to see through, points of view to wrestle with, and conclusions to debate, or live with, or cry about. It could feed the soul.

So I struck out, forging my way into a medium I knew little about, learning as I went: Going to classes, finding critique groups, doing the research, the interviews, and the constant observation, writing, and revision needed to create a story that feels both real and alive.

To be a writer, I learned, is to tap into the gift of experience and voice – yours, others – blending them into a painting that gives people new ways to see, think, and feel. For me, this comes best by observing my world with a painstaking attention to detail, and listening attentively for the stories we all hold and the potential they all provide.

Back in 1996, I did not know that when I was recording a group of rowdy drunks partying at the gates of an execution, they would later play a role in a novel I would one day author. But I made note of their celebration, and its effect on me. And then, at the appropriate time, it appeared in a scene in The Crying Tree, and appears here now in this essay as I consider how important it is to reach into the moments we have and glean what we can.

Naseem Rakha is an award-winning author and journalist whose stories have been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Marketplace Radio, Christian Science Monitor, and Living on Earth. She lives in Oregon with her husband, son, and many animals. When Naseem isn’t writing, she’s reading, knitting, hiking, gardening, or just watching the seasons roll in and out. www.naseemrakha.com

Buy the book on Amazon

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Weekly Writing Prompt #4

Welcome to this week’s featured writing prompt. Enjoy! and don’t forget to post your finished work in the comments section (optional).

Pop!

Guest blogger, Allison Winn Scotch
From the author’s blog, June 14, 2010.

Pop.

That’s the sound that nearly every author hears once his or her book is released out into the world. It’s the sound of the bubble deflating, as he or she looks around and thinks…now what?

It both seems and feels impossible to believe that after a year of work, The One That I Want, has been out for nearly two weeks, and while yes, I have some big things ahead – some prominent reviews (fingers crossed), some signings/readings out west next week (Seattle – June 22nd, LA – June 24th) – for the most part, now, the book goes out and does its thing, and it is time to get back to life.

Pop.

It’s strange, to toil so much on it – the book, the promotion, all of it that goes into a year’s worth of work – and then realize, well, life goes on. And in my case, that means turning my attention back to my next book, which I’ve neglected in the wake of the promotional flurry of this one. In many ways, books feel like children: you focus your attention on them for a while when they’re young, and then you realize, “Oh, they’re going to be okay, let’s see what else is going on around the house,” and you stop worrying. I’m not at the point where I’ve stopped worrying about The One, but I am at the point – which I promise you every published author reaches – where I think it’s time to start looking around the house to see what else there is. The revelation came this week when I was talking about The Memory of Us (my next book), and I couldn’t remember the name of two of my main characters. Oops. I’ve neglected one child for another, and that’s never a good thing.

I think this is the hangover phase of a book release, and it’s inevitable. I have literally never spoken to an author who didn’t experience this. What did we expect? That the world would stop spinning on its axis with the release? That our lives would be magically changed? I dunno. I’ve been through this twice before, so I didn’t expect anything along those lines, and to be sure, my hangover is much lighter compared to my previous books’ releases. I know that the pop is coming – that the world certainly won’t stop spinning on its axis – and I’m ready for it. I have my figurative Advil standing by, and in many ways, I’m relieved. There’s something almost disconcerting about spending so much time obsessing about a singular thing in your life, and I’m exhaling that it’s time – and that I’m ready – to concentrate on everything else now.

To be sure, there are still some great things ahead for The One, and I cannot wait. But I’m almost glad this bubble has popped. That’s the difference between the first two books, when I was discombobulated when I had to move on. Now, I welcome it. There is so much more in life than just a book’s release! Like writing my next one and remembering both the names of my characters and why I loved them. Also, things like balance with my family and letting go of stress and being grateful for the fact that I got to publish a book at all.

So maybe this time it’s not a hangover, it’s waking up the next morning after a huge party and realizing that I’m NOT hungover. That’s so much better.

Writers – will you share your experiences of post-book feelings? Did you feel this pop too?

Allison Winn Scotch is the author of the novels The One That I Want, The Time of My Life, and The Department of Lost and Found. Her work has also appeared in Parents, Glamour, and Redbook. She lives in New York with her husband, son, daughter, and their dog. www.allisonwinn.com

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

« Previous Page — Next Page »