The weirdest Summer of my professional career came to a surreal close this past weekend as I attended the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference as a speaker and journalist rather than the publisher and marketing director who curated ~80% of the event before my departure in early July. I’m obviously still biased, but overall, it was an invigorating experience—from the amazing keynotes and insightful presenters, to the mini-reunion with some of my all-time favorite colleagues, all survivors of F+W Media’s disastrous bankruptcy process that seems to have ended relatively well… for Writer’s Digest, at least.
Tag: Writing
My own Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, and occasional commentary on all of the above.
We never look up anymore…
Don’t be fooled / by the cul de sac / the gingerbreading / the German engineering
Falling Back In Love With the Poetry Slam
The slam isn’t the automatic audience draw it used to be (for us, at least), and I can’t help but wonder if that’s partly because, a long time ago, the organized slam became much less about putting on a good show for the audience and providing an open forum for a variety of voices, and more about establishing an alternative career path for a select group of poets. The revolution gone corporate, as so often happens.
Writer Dads: A new column for VQR!
As a married father of two who has long struggled with finding the right balance that allows for enough time to write, I was disappointed by the absence of voices that resembled my own experience, and was inspired to do something about it. And so, “Writer Dads” was conceived and, finally, born.
Mozer, Bethea and Me (for Veteran’s Day)
Veteran’s Day isn’t a time for generic sentiments, positive or negative, but a time for personal reflection. I’m generally ambivalent about my time in the military because I met far too many people who defied easy stereotypes of what it means to be pro- or anti-war, and I’ve always had nothing but respect for anyone who has served, not to mention a fair bit of curiosity about why they did so.
Let Poetry Be
I’ve always been fascinated (and frustrated) by poetry’s “delicate snowflake” status, and how such a diverse variety of forms, styles, and voices often gets lumped into such a generic, cavernous category, like literary fiction and graphic novels. One of the things I’ve always loved about good anthologies and open mics is the inherent (or the potential for) diversity in those formats, something that’s not clearly communicated on bookstore shelves nor the Dewey Decimal system.
You Can Go Home Again
I’ve noted often in the past that most of what I preach and practice when it comes to marketing and community-building, I learned during those four years of Mondays, and by the end of the night last Monday, I realized how big a hole I’d created when I walked away from that part of my life. So, I’m back.