Writing/Reader Group

If anyone is interested in meeting once a month or so to workshop writings and share readings, let's organize before the final. This class is so wonderfully diverse in backgrounds and interests...and we actually have a comraderie. I think that some sort of continued contact would be a good thing. It would be nice to figure out if others want to meet as well...and figure out what that would look like. Where? When? etc.

Harry Potter

This article is just too funny when you consider that A.) This is a top news story on Yahoo and B.) It's a book

Copies of Harry Potter Leaked

Star People

I found two things of interest when I was researching my past-life regression experience. Brad and Francie Steiger had a book out entitled Star People. It was Francie that first approached me in an audience of about 300 (my memory of it from 1980 or so at the Palmer Hotel in Chicago)and told me that I was indeed a star person...so I guess we should believe her because she literally wrote the book. Sarcasm aside...it was at a seminar organized and run by Dick Sutphen and his then wife Trina or Trini...again, faulty memory. I'll have to look it up again. But when I googled Dick I found this great piece...enough fodder for some really great creative pieces. Go to www.holysmoke.org/wb/wb0315.htm which should link up to a Sutphen article titled "The Battle for your Mind"...Such a blurry area between scifi and paranormal realities! Then of course after so many philosophy courses my litmus test for what is real has altered from the mainstream considerably.

Recommended Reading

You should make a concerted effort to read as many of these as possible, reading actively for things such as POV, story structure, character development, etc.

Online Genre Short Stories:

- Four Short Novels

- Lydia's Body by Vylar Kaftan

- The Other Amazon by Jenny Davidson

- Magnificent Pigs by Cat Rambo

- Fourteen Experiments in Postal Delivery by John Schoffstall

- Start With Color by Bill Kte'pi

- You Can Walk on the Moon if the Mood's Right by Bill Kte'pi

- 2:30 by Leslie What

- The Jenna Set by Daniel Kaysen

McSweeny's Internet Tendency Stories (very short):

- AN OPEN LETTER OF APOLOGY TO THE COUNTRY OF ICELAND

- ROUNDER CHARACTERS IN NO TIME FLAT!

- EIGHT NEW ENTRIES IN THE 2007 WRITER'S MARKET GUIDE TO LITERARY JOURNALS.

- WHAT I WOULD BE THINKING ABOUT IF I WERE BILLY JOEL DRIVING TOWARD A HOLIDAY PARTY WHERE I KNEW THERE WAS GOING TO BE A PIANO.

- ON BEING A CANDIDATE TO TAKE OVER A LATE-NIGHT NETWORK TALK SHOW.

- "HAVE YOU EVER EATEN A BABY? "

- REJECTED AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS SUBMISSIONS, AS LOGGED BY JUNIOR PRODUCTION ASSISTANT INTERN KENNETH POLK.

- I WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGIZE TO THE CLASS.

- I'M STARTING TO SUSPECT THAT A DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS PLAYER NAMED "ELGDORF THE MAGE" IS ABUSING HIS WIKIPEDIA EDITORIAL PRIVILEGES.

Online "Literary" Short Stories:

- Happy Endings by Margaret Atwood

- She Wasn't Soft by T.C. Boyle

- Guts by Chuck Palahniuk (**NB: I'm not quite sure if I can count this as literary, but there's no better place for it... but it's VERY graphic--don't read if you have a weak stomach)

- Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff

- A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

- Where are you Going? Where have you Been? by Joyce Carol Oates