Women Writers and the Story Circle Network

March 24, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

More than twenty years ago, I coauthored a book with an attorney. Not only did it get published, it was also translated into Spanish. The topic, the momentum for its topic, seems basically gone now. Some technical and business magazines published a few articles I wrote. I wrote some safety manuals, other technical stuff, rather boring, uninspiring. Then I discovered the Story Circle Network.

The Story Circle Network inspired me to write creatively again–once upon a time in high school my poetry was published. Then I quit writing for years. When I started again, it was technical or business writing. If you want to write your stories, read other women’s stories, just explore fiction, poetry, travel writing, you name it, join this organization. It changed not only my writing life, but my life in a broader sense. Through it I met not only other writers, I also became a board member, made new friends who write and share. This inspiring organization not only provides classes, publishes, but also hosts various writing contests and a biannual conference. In the middle of April, I will head to Austin for the conference. The keynote speaker is no other than Brooke Warner, the woman who founded She Writes Press. Go to http://www.storycircle.org to learn more about the conference and the just announced winners of the Sarton Women’s Literary Awards, become inspired, create, publish, grow. Without this organization, I seriously doubt I would have written my book of poetry, published by Uno Mundo Press in April 2014.

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Because of comments from readers of this book, inspiration from friends, and personal interests, I am now working on another book.

I offer thanks to the Story Circle Network for renewing my writing life.

Hey poets, be good literary citizens. No more excuses.

March 25, 2015March 25, 2015 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This post reiterates advice I would give myself. Additionally, I would add something I wish I had known a year ago before my book of poetry was published. No one told me that most writing contests require unpublished work. If you want to enter poetry contests, enter before you publish. Many contests even include work published in blogs as previously published. I continue to hunt for contests that allow previously published work. It seems few exist. If any of you writers out there know about such a contest, please let me know.

Brianna Pike

With AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) and National Poetry Month just around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a working poet. I’ve got a couple of projects in the works for the month of April (updates to come soon) but I keep coming back to a piece of advice I’m always giving my students, which is that poetry doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Poetry is about the poet but it’s also about the community where the poet lives and works.

Admittedly, the idea of community is constantly evolving. Your community can be your workplace, the local bookstore or coffee shop you frequent or your local library. However, community can also mean something much bigger, especially in the wake Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I’ve blogged about my love affair with social media and the poetry world. This love centers around the fact that Facebook…

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Who Is the Best Writer: A Matter of Taste and Viewpoint

December 29, 2014December 29, 2014 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Until I was asked to be a judge for a memoir competition, I did not spend a lot of time thinking about this topic. For years my general awareness about writing preferences included the knowledge that the writers I prefer and usually read rarely hit the best seller list and generally are not white, main stream USA. What do I read: Native American (American Indian), Indian as in the country of India, and Latin American writers, and writers from the Middle East, especially Iran. My favorite writer is Leslie Marmon Silko. My favorite book of hers is Storyteller. My favorite story, “Yellow Woman”, is in that book as well as numerous literary anthologies. I estimate I have read that story at least fifty times, maybe more. Why? In spite of asking myself that question, I remain somewhat clueless. Because of my current teaching assignment which includes British literature from Beowulf to now, I try my best to read a bunch of British literature. For instance, I just read I, Claudius by Robert Graves. Of course, it has nothing to do with Britain; perhaps it does not count. Next on my list is The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. This book won the Man Booker Prize in 2006. Although she writes in English, she obviously is not British unless you consider being in a former British colony counts as British.

Back to my contest assignment: Two of the books I was assigned to read nearly put me to sleep. One did not; in fact I liked it a lot–enough to mark pages with passages I plan to use when I need writing inspiration/ideas later. When I read a bunch of reviews recently, it came as quite a shock to find one of those put-me-to-sleep books favorably reviewed. Could I really have been that far off base? I consider the possibility that even though I have read some excellent memoirs, I find many of them impossible to read. Why? From my viewpoint, many memoirs whine, lament, and carry on about the past in a way I find highly objectionable. Who wants to read hundreds of pages about how someone overcame addiction or some hideous disease or a divorce? Apparently, a lot of people. Even though I consider The Glass Castle an excellent book, I even had a difficult time plugging through the last 50 pages of that one. Some of Storyteller is a memoir–a combination of poetry, vignettes, photos, but it also includes several enlightening short stories. While writing now and reflecting, I can only think of one other memoir type book, I actually recommend to people, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A Place to Stand. While stopping by the library this morning, I did pick up Willie Nelson’s latest, Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die. It even has a foreword by Kinky Friedman, who in my opinion would make a much better governor than any one we have experienced in Texas lately or will have for the foreseeable future. With a title like that, about Willie, and Kinky thrown in, surely it won’t be too boring.