WAITING FOR A GODOT by Melodie Johnson Howe Recently, talking to an auditorium filled with beginning writers, I quoted Leon Russell: “It took me twenty years to learn to write without inspiration.” I saw many mouths, mostly women’s, drop open in shock. Or was it fear? Or was it the disappointing reality of the statement; […]
EDITOR! EDITOR! by James Lincoln Warren There are basically three kinds of criticism for fiction: literary criticism scholastically examines fiction as an artefact in an aesthetic or cultural context; reviews are popular criticism, supposed to provide a thumbnail sketch of a work with the object of letting the reader decide whether it is worth his […]
GRANNY and the GREAT SMOKE-OUT by Leigh Lundin If I start at the beginning, I have to tell about my grandmother. She was a pioneer woman, a Quaker homesteader in Iowa, running her own farm long after anyone else would have retired. Even in her latter 70s, she sewed lap robes for the ‘old people’, […]