Posts Tagged "Spry Literary Journal"
ABC’s of Fiction Writing: E is for Experiment
Whenever I’m asked who my favorite writer is, I always answer Thomas Pynchon. Having a relationship with Pynchon’s work can be difficult and frustrating and I never recommend him to other readers because so many people don’t connect with him or outright dislike him. But for me, nothing can replace or downgrade the sensation I felt after reading Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time in my early twenties. Page after page astonished me. I kept asking myself, “You can do this? They will let you get away with that?” Encountering that book gave me permission to try whatever came to mind with my own writing. It let me know that changes in structure,...
Read MoreABC’s of Fiction Writing: D is for Dialogue
Within the Speech-Marks The author, unaccustomed to public speaking as he was, gripped the lectern with white-knuckled fists. Cleared his throat. Took a swig of water. Set aside the distraction of imagining the audience naked. Then began: “Today, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,we’re going to talk about dialogue.” The author suffered a momentary mental-blank and fumbled for his notes. But suddenly he found he could no longer decipher his own writing. It looked as though a spider had crawled across the page, trailing ink from each of its limbs. “Dialogue in fiction,” he said in desperation, “is a multi-faceted thing.” It...
Read MoreABC’s of Writing (for Beginners): G for Generalization
Poetry is a very peculiar kind of magic. It is built, as so many beautiful things are, out of contradictions. In poems, we make meaning of the seemingly insignificant, time shortens and alternately stretches, the past is alive, and memory crisper and clearer on paper than it could ever be in our own heads. Magic. But there’s something all beginning (and sometimes not-so-beginning) poets do because of said contradictions, something I would categorize as an understandable error in judgment—they generalize what they’re trying to say in an attempt to write something that their readers can connect with. They take what they want to write about and hammer out the details...
Read MoreBehind the Words: Wei He
Wei He is in the beginning of a long, successful, bilingual writing career. After accepting her short fiction story “You Are the City” for the first issue of Spry, we were shocked to find out that it was her first English publication. You’d think she spoke and wrote English her entire life with the way her words preformed a melody on the page. Her short story was so lyrical and well written, and Spry was honored to be the home for this story. Wei He was kind enough to speak with Erin about the story, her process, and current aspirations. Erin Ollila: H, the narrator of “You are the City” considers the world (specifically the city)...
Read MoreBehind the Words: Chels Knorr
Chels Knorr is an editor, a writer, a student, and a soon-to-be MFA graduate. She came to Spry in our third issue with her lovely creative nonfiction essay, “Navigating the Margin,” a piece that dealt with big themes like figuring out roles in a new marriage and finding–and giving away a pet–all in the same day. If you haven’t read it yet, head over to read it now and then come back here! She prefers writing short creative nonfiction, but don’t let the length fool you. Her essays are lively and full of emotions. Erin Ollila: Navigating the Margin” is a very short essay. Coming in at just over 1,000 words, it could...
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