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don’t say you’re a writer if you just write fanfiction for your entertainment. you’re only a writer if you kill a bear with a typewriter to appease the spirit of hemingway and slather yourself in ink in tribute to shakespeare, the one true over-penis of literature.

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You know, they say that there is a part of the human chest that if you strike it hard enough the person’s heart explodes. This sounds like such a lie that I have to believe it’s the truth. If I were science, I’d never tell anyone where this place is. If I were science, I’d have named this place after you.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, from “Not As Smart As I Think I Am” (via creatingaquietmind)

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Each time the same - I am holy, holy, holy, laid out as a banquet. His hands are plate, cup, and knife. Always a long table, a single high-backed chair. This is my body. He eats me up and I believe in transubstantiation, that I will awake someday in his veins, pound my fists against the walls of him.

Margaret Bashaar, “Claire and the Demon Hunter Give It Up For Jesus,” published in Vector Press (via bostonpoetryslam)

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The most romantic thing a human being can say to another human being is Let me help you vomit. No human being has ever said this to me & I keep going to god too clean as though god is frightened of muddy feet. If I am missing a hairpin I don’t go at all. Please describe your vomiting; it is like a psalm for me a place where wilderness might be new. Other people’s dirt makes a lovely frock. Grant I be forgiven in the gush.

— Melissa Broder, Waterfall

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Is it a lie or memory in the city I don’t want the sky? I have suicide to make me safe and when I am a coward I look into milk and think finally I have learned my sorries I am separate from instinct, extracting music into an alibi or sucking cock on the parquet floor really I am appraising the family photographs it is easy to take a good look easy to kneel and be grateful for abstraction which is luxury and remains my first mistake.

"Snow," Marni Ludwig, Poet’s Sampler, Boston Review.  (via selfperformancewith)

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If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Ray Bradbury (via kristindashiell)

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                 A poem, like trying to remember, is a movement of the whole body.

Rosmarie Waldrop, from “The Ambition of Ghosts: I. Remembering into Sleep,” Another Language: Selected Poems (Talisman House Publishers, 1997)

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"The man to my right started telling me about all the ways that the internet is degrading the English language. He brought up Facebook and he said: "to defriend, I mean is that a real word?”. I wanna pause on that question: what makes a word ‘real’?”- Anne Curzan, What makes a word “real”? TEDxUofM [x]

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Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouses, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs. When people communicate, they communicate with their faces, their bodies, their timing, and the objects around them. Make this a full conversation. Not just the words part.

Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction (via the-right-writing)

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A helpful list of places to submit short stories.

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The big second-half 2014 preview is here at last, and it’s a doozy — with books by Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Marilynn Robinson, Denis Johnson, Hilary Mantel, Margaret Atwood, and 77 more.

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Marc Chagall, born this day in 1887, painted this dreamlike birthday scene in 1915. 

[Marc Chagall. Birthday. 1915.] 

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i. i remember you best hating all the boys who got to you

i'm writing a novel in verse.

this girl who you never hear from has two love affairs in a row. the first is with a woman, the second is with a man. the lasting love is with her best friend, and with music in general.

novels in verse are a relatively rare phenomenon. some of them are beautiful. they're more than a narrative or an epic poem, because they consist of parts. poems in chapters? but it begs the question. what can a novel in verse do that a novel or a poem can't do.

in a story of people, there are always sides. your side, my side, his side, their side. when you read a story about people, you have to pick a side, and usually that says more about you than it does about them. what a poem in verse does is offer you sides without narrative expectation: you're not stuck to one person, one point of view. so far this story is living in 1969, in 2003, in 2014, in the future and the distant past. each loose end is contra-a novel. fractured narratives be damned, to stick with a consistent point of view, you end up with some kind of resolution, something to carry through. you care about the reliability of a narrator, whether it's the author or the character.

i've been reading a lot of books recently. yesterday i finished the 5th novel this week. each has been an experiment i realise now, in learning how a story works. what will i forgive. i've loved characters and i've hated them. i've loved style over substance, and followthrough over form. everything is an experiment.

a novel is a game of poker, where you play the person across from you; a poem is a game of blackjack, where you win or you lose; a novel in verse might just be a deck of tarot cards, with a different story every time you read.

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I hear the orange sound of a trumpet parting the clouds late at night where are you? you are the sound the moon makes when it is tired of being used as a romantic object

Joshua Espinoza (via stasmagica)

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Your name is safe in my mouth— your heart too, tendons twined around my tongue, body cradled in the cage of my teeth. I will lock you up tight, in the space above my throat where even I cannot get you

Kate Horowitz, Your Name is Safe in My Mouth  (via fuseli)

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“But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.”

Margaret Atwood (via rabbitinthemoon)