Write The Book: Conversations on Craft

Writer, editor and photographer Kimberly Garrett Brown, whose new book is Cora's Kitchen (Inanna Publications). 

This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to consider an unlikely friendship. Who are the individuals and why would a friendship between them be unexpected? How do they meet? Are they in the same town, on vacation, at a rest area, in a nursing home? Do they hit it off from the start, or do they find common ground gradually? Consider these questions and these characters, find a setting that perhaps enhances the specific challenges of their relationship, and write. Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

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A new interview with Vermont author Doug Wilhelm about his nonfiction book, Catalysts for Change: How Nonprofits and a Foundation Are Helping Shape Vermont's Future (Rootstock). 

This week’s Write the Book Prompt was kindly suggested by my guest, Doug Wilhelm, who thinks about stories all the time. Find one observation: something you’ve overhead or seen, and make a story from it. This can be a piece of conversation or part of an argument, an interesting person who stood out for some reason. Take note of this small observation, and start writing. Story involves tension, so see what tension might emerge from what you began with, and then see if the tension will resolve somehow. 

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

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Two interviews from the archives - with our old music! -  with Vermont author and editor Angela Palm and Vermont poet Malisa Garlieb. Angela Palm's collection Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here  won the Graywolf nonfiction award, was an Oprah.com pick for "Powerful Memoirs by Powerful Women," an Indie Next List pick, and A Kirkus Best Book in 2016. Poet Malisa Garlieb's work has appeared in Qu, RHINO Poetry, Rust + Moth, Rathalla Review, Tar River Poetry, Calyx, Painted Bride Quarterly, So to Speak, Gyroscope Review, Cold Lake Anthology and many many more. Her poetry collection, Handing Out Apples in Eden., was published in 2014 by Wind Ridge Books of Vermont. 

This week's Write the Book Prompt, as we approach Banned Books Week is to buy, read, and write about a banned book and the effects of book banning.

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.

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Vermont Poet Daniel Lusk, who's new collection is Every Slow Thing (Kelsay Books). 

This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to consider what Daniel calls his “farthings,” tiny Zen-like poems that share wit, irony, natural beauty, and wisdom. Here are a few of his, kindly shared with us:

• Sepals - As if priests were magpies and souls were shiny objects. As if brothels were little seminaries of corporeal art. 

• After the Storm - And Noah sent forth birds, voiceless gestures over the fathomless silence in search of something that might be said.

• Lyric - Listen! There is saffron on the poet's bow. 

So those are a few of Daniel Lusk's "Farthings." The new collection Farthings is published by Yavanika Press. See if you can come up with some of your own.   

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

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New York Times bestselling author Fiona Barton, whose new novel is Local Gone Missing (Berkley).

This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to write about an altercation between someone who lives full time in a small town and a visitor, seasonal homeowner, or tourist. What sets them off and what preceded the incident for each of them? How does the full-time resident feel about outsiders before this event, and what changes?

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

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An interview from the archives (with our old music!) with Vermont poet and UVM Professor Stephen Cramer. We discussed his book From the Hip: A Concise History of Hip Hop (in sonnets). Since that time, Stephen has published a number of other books. His latest collection, The Disintegration Loops, "attempts to uncover the music within the world's dissolution and fragmentation, from Italian masters painting over the work of previous artists, to the innocence of childhood giving way to scars, to the description of badly stored tapes being looped and played over and over again until they begin to flake."

This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to consider the world's "dissolution and fragmentation" and write about something that changes with time, for better or for worse.

Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

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A new interview with the author Mohsin Hamid, whose latest novel is The Last White Man (Riverhead). 

This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to write about a drastic change in a character’s life - even something unlikely or impossible - that changes their world in some way, bringing both difficulty and relief. 

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

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Vermont poet Laura Budofsky Wisniewski, the author of Sanctuary, Vermont (Orison). 

This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest, Laura Budofsky Wisniewski. Set a timer and start writing. Do not stop. Even if you have to occasionally write the same word over and over until the next word comes, keep it up. When the timer goes off at whatever point you designated - two minutes, five minutes, twenty - stop writing. If what you were creating was poetry, use the next little while to make line breaks in the piece. Then delete everything that’s not interesting and see what you have come up with. 

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

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Vermont photographer and writer across genres Shanta Lee Gander, whose debut poetry collection, Ghettoclaustrophobia: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues (Diode Editions), won the Vermont Book Award for Poetry in 2021. 

This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest, Shanta Lee Gander, who mentioned her own version of this during our conversation. 

What are your impossible things that are all true?  

The Shenanigans List

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”

Are there funny things that people in your life have shared or things that they say?  For Shanta, the shenanigans list includes real vignettes and quotes of the ridiculous, the absurd and the most surreal things that usually has one thinking, "This is so good, I can't make this up."

For this prompt, and perhaps as an ongoing practice, think about quotes, funny things and quirky things and start your own list of the impossible, the bizarre and surreal. Start a shenanigans list; you'll be surprised at the material it may provide in the future for other writing!

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

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An interview from the archives with novelist and story writer J. Robert Lennon. We discussed his story collection, See You in Paradise, published by Graywolf Press. Last year he published two more books with Graywolf, a novel called Subdivision and a story collection, Let Me Think. 

This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to write a paragraph about a moment that takes place in a park. Maybe a dog breaks free of her leash and runs away from her owner. Write about whatever moment you choose to present. Then write the paragraph again from two different perspectives. Perhaps that of the dog, or another dog, a person who feeds birds from a bench, a person who sleeps on that bench at night, a policeman, a young child in a stroller, that child’s grandfather, who is taking her for a walk. See what happens to the moment you’re creating when you let it be seen through these varied perspectives.

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

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