Eleven books for twelve dollars. Money well spent.
Last month, I went to the Rolla (Missouri) Public Library’s fall book sale and came home with a nice haul of reading materials. It was $12 well spent, and the money went to support our local library.
Here’s what I got, and what I hope to read over the holidays and beyond:
Continue reading “Library book sale haul”How powerful first lines can draw your reader into your story.
One lesson the professors at journalism school drilled into my head was the importance of crafting a compelling first paragraph (aka the lede in news parlance).
The opening paragraph is the most important element of your story. It must grab readers’ attention and get them to read more, so it must be finely crafted and honed to its sharpest possible point.
The same applies to more literary writing–whether a novel, a short story, or a creative nonfiction essay. These five opening sentences from some recent stories and essays do a good job of hooking the reader. Each example below comes from The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses 2025 Edition. And while there are other notable pieces I could have pulled from this anthology, I chose these five because they are great and because you can also read them online, for free.
Continue reading “Friday Five: grand openings”‘Although they are fiction, I want the stories to seem real, so I am very specific in describing actual places, and I hew closely to what I know.’
In her short story “A Fait Accompli,” which recently won the Short Story Substack award for a story about family, Kate Kinney deftly weaves a poignant and powerful tale of an elderly widow who escapes her assisted-living residence for a holiday shopping spree but cannot escape the control of her power-of-attorney-wielding son nor certain elements of her past. Written in a first-person voice and steeped in realism, “A Fait Accompli” combines detail and seemingly mundane events with a view into the main character’s interior life and memories. The result is a whimsical story that holds the reader’s attention to the very end.
An educator as well as a writer, Kate chairs the Department of English at Suffolk County Community College in New York, where she also teaches writing and literature. She earned her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is a 2025-2026 Writers Institute Fellow, and attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, The Toronto Journal, Superpresent Magazine, The New York Times, and NomadArtX. As a literary scholar, she has studied the influence of another writer named Kate: Kate Chopin. She co-edited the book Kate Chopin in Contexts: From Theory to Practice and is the author of the articles “Kate Chopin: A Woman of and Beyond Her Time” and “Teaching Chopin Through Multimedia.”
Read on to learn how Kate Kinney gleans story magic from the everyday, how her work as a teacher influences her writing, and how binge-watching The Walking Dead informed her favorite essay.
Continue reading “Friday Five: writer, educator, and Short Story Substack winner Kate Kinney”Why verisimilitude matters in all forms of fiction (with examples)
Note: If you don’t want to wade through this entire post, feel free to go directly to the examples near the end of this post. – AC
I was reviewing some early chapters of a work in progress recently when I discovered a problem with the text that–while perhaps insignificant to the overarching plot–could ruin the story’s credibility and my credibility as a writer if I didn’t fix it.
The novel is set in the early 1980s, and music plays a significant role in it. In one early chapter, I reference a song that, when I was writing the chapter, I was certain was ubiquitous on FM radio during the time frame of this portion of the novel. But as often happens when I rely on my increasingly foggy memory, I did not remember correctly.
Continue reading “A boring realist’s thoughts on keeping it real”‘I wanted to create a literary space that is informative yet also entertaining’
If you want to keep up on what’s happening in the world of literary magazines, you should be reading Becky Tuch‘s Substack newsletter, Lit Mag News. This bi-weekly newsletter lives up to its billing as “a resource for all things lit mag,” and in a sector awash in newsletters about the writing craft, Lit Mag News is a must-read.
Each issue features “the latest goings-on in the world of literary magazines,” Becky explains on her about page. Those goings-on include information about new magazines, calls for submissions, contests, job and fellowship opportunities, grant opportunities, trends in lit mag publishing, and “controversies, scams, and the occasional smidge of lit mag gossip.” The writing is always conversational, often entertaining, and delivered in a breezy and easily digestible manner.
Continue reading “Friday Five: writer, editor, and Lit Mag News creator Becky Tuch”
