The Trees of the Mind

While conducting research for a current essay project on identity and self-definition in the works of Virginia Woolf, I keep stumbling over the roots of Sylvia Plath’s trees – the shriveling figs and ancient yews, black pine and seeding winter trees, the diseased elm, and Polly’s dream tree, a “thicket of sticks” with a larkspur [...]

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Book Clubs Holiday Party

Laguna Beach Books is inviting all book clubs to attend a holiday party on Sunday, December 5, at 5:00 p.m.  This is a perfect opportunity to preview next year’s new releases, meet Wade Lucas from Random House and Joe Murphy from W. W. Norton, and mix and mingle with other avid readers and book club [...]

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Fall, Leaves, Fall

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree.   I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day.                                            ~ Emily Bronte   

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The Butterfly of the Moment

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes [...]

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The Rainy Day

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never weary; The vine still clings to the mouldering wall, But at every gust the dead leaves fall, And the day is dark and dreary.   My life is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never [...]

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More is More

After spending yet another painful weekend pruning over 4,000 words or roughly fifteen pages from a complex essay that took over a month of previous weekends to craft, I am becoming increasingly puzzled by and frustrated with the stringent word count restrictions imposed by literary and academic conferences and writing competitions and am wondering for [...]

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Time to Submit – Fall Deadlines

November 15 – Sigma Tau Delta  The online paper submission link for the 2011 Sigma Tau Delta International English Convention will close at 11:59 p.m. on November 15.  Scholarship applications are due on November 22.  For more information regarding the convention, submission guidelines, and accommodations, go to www.englishconvention.org or refer to my September 27 post [...]

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The Reality of Rejection

I’ve been thinking a lot about rejection lately.  As I prepare two critical essay submissions and my independent blog application for the Sigma Tau Delta convention judges and a short story proposal to be considered for presentation at the 2011 John Fowles Literary Forum, how could I not?  Sending out these pieces, these fragments of [...]

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National Novel Writing Month

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo, an annual creative writing event that challenges participants to write a new 50,000-word novel in thirty days.  The project was founded by Chris Baty in 1999 with 21 participants, and the official NaNoWriMo website was launched the following year.  The number of registered participants has [...]

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Poetry Reading – Allison Joseph

As part of the 2010 Tabula Poetica Reading Series, Chapman University’s Department of English is pleased to present the award-winning poet Allison Joseph, author of My Father’s Kites (2010).    The event will take place on Tuesday, November 9, beginning with a discussion led by Joseph on “Dispatches from a Poetry Editor” in Argyros Forum 201 [...]

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