Forty years, semester by semester of a journal publishing creative work is very impressive to me. The Journal can be found at the link. I've been writing for 21 or is it 22 years, not counting all my diaries and journals during the time I make it my own way without classes or instructors, just do the writing. Diaries are how I forced myself into college because I bemoaned so many things and college offered the answer. Below are some of the journals I mine now and then for material.
About Poetry on the Journal
I saw a lot of columnar poems, short pithy sentence structure that enforces sharp word use and offers a simple check on rhythm. I saw a lot of violence, people imagining death from some perspective. Some of the poems slipped from reality into a different fantasy space that was more appealing than the confrontation with violence. I wonder why? Were all of these generated by the same theme, I wondered?
About Fiction on the Journal
Chase Burke's Crash Landing melds the writing world with the day to day world in a quick flash fiction piece, mostly in reality space. Maggie Su's piece Echolocation and RickCanning's Then He Wished She Hadn't offered views of modern relationships that made me happy to be married.
About Nonfiction on the Journal
I especially liked how most of the nonfiction pieces couldn't really be identified as nonfiction, the prose was seamless in the active portrayal of events. I especially liked Rough Outline for Essay on Bikes by Elizabeth O'Brien using events from story plotting as a key to entry into the piece about a relationship with a positive model for relationships formed out of a friendship with an antagonist who turns benefactress but who suffers from addiction and Sabriel Parker's This is How We Separate, an emotional, sensual flash fiction piece, which says she probably learned marriage easier than I, who always wanted to be myself not Bob and I, but now I've fallen into it as inextricably connected.
I found I liked the quality of the material in The Journal, happy to finally have a few days to read again.
I saw a lot of columnar poems, short pithy sentence structure that enforces sharp word use and offers a simple check on rhythm. I saw a lot of violence, people imagining death from some perspective. Some of the poems slipped from reality into a different fantasy space that was more appealing than the confrontation with violence. I wonder why? Were all of these generated by the same theme, I wondered?
About Fiction on the Journal
Chase Burke's Crash Landing melds the writing world with the day to day world in a quick flash fiction piece, mostly in reality space. Maggie Su's piece Echolocation and RickCanning's Then He Wished She Hadn't offered views of modern relationships that made me happy to be married.
About Nonfiction on the Journal
I especially liked how most of the nonfiction pieces couldn't really be identified as nonfiction, the prose was seamless in the active portrayal of events. I especially liked Rough Outline for Essay on Bikes by Elizabeth O'Brien using events from story plotting as a key to entry into the piece about a relationship with a positive model for relationships formed out of a friendship with an antagonist who turns benefactress but who suffers from addiction and Sabriel Parker's This is How We Separate, an emotional, sensual flash fiction piece, which says she probably learned marriage easier than I, who always wanted to be myself not Bob and I, but now I've fallen into it as inextricably connected.
I found I liked the quality of the material in The Journal, happy to finally have a few days to read again.
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