Editor’s Note: Thank you to Dan Henry for offering this remembrance of Carlin “Buckwheat” Donahue. Dan writes, “Buckwheat was the founder of many fine events (such as the Skagway Belly Bounce), but is remembered by writers for being a co-founder of the North Words Writers Symposium, now in its 11th year, in Skagway on May […]
Dan Henry | Buckwheat Walking: A 2006 Trip Journal Read More »
Editor’s Note: Thank you to Lisa Alexia for this review of Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth. Bathsheba will be teaching a nonfiction workshop for 49 Writers during her time in Anchorage. You can sign up on our web site. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, by Bathsheba Demuth (W.W. Norton & Co,
Lisa Alexia | Crossing Borders: Review of Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth Read More »
Editor’s Note: Please Join us in Anchorage on Friday, November 15, 2019 at 7 PM at The Writer’s Block Bookstore & Café in Anchorage. 49 Writers, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Center for the Narrative & Lyric Arts present two engaging and provocative stories from the new AQR edition: Lee Conell’s “Ex Party” and Debbi Urbanksi’s
Mary Odden | Old Guns, New Guns in AQR Read More »
What we like can do so much for our writing, including challenging us to come at our fiction in novel ways. So don’t segregate your likes into the “for fun” column and forget about them when you get down to work. Investigate your likes. Interrogate them. Ask yourself: Why do you like what you like—and how can it help you become a better writer?
Jamey Bradbury | No Accounting for Taste: Finding Form in What You Like Read More »
Who among us doesn’t have a dead novel or memoir that resisted all CPR efforts? Who hasn’t wondered if some part of it couldn’t be saved or repurposed? With that in mind, I’ll share a few lessons I learned from my experience doing a “page one rewrite” of my novel currently titled “Annie and the Wolves.”
Andromeda Romano-Lax | Page One Rewrite, Part Two Read More »
In August 2017, I had one of the strangest experiences of my writing life. I opened a file in a folder associated with a novel I’d given up on five years earlier, read a few unfamiliar paragraphs, What’s this?, and then a few pages more, I know I wrote it; I just don’t remember writing it. I kept going all the way to the end of the chapter, and found myself intrigued, What the heck is going to happen next?
Andromeda Romano-Lax | Page One Rewrite, Part One Read More »
If you don’t have enough time to write—who does?—read this. Do you have a “portable process?” That’s what prolific author Julianna Baggott — twenty books published under three names — calls it. Her advice resonates with something I’ve done on and off for years but underutilized until I made the process more deliberate. “Portable process” doesn’t mean
Sometimes writers need to get away from the people and things that fill their days so they can create. Each spring and fall, 49 Writers secures space at the National Shrine of Saint Therese for a writer’s retreat. The May 2019 retreat took place in The Lodge, a two-story log building that can sleep 24
Dan Branch & Katie Bausler | 49 Writers Spring Retreat Reflections Read More »
It’s been quite a #NationalPoetryMonth here, one that ran the gamut. About five minutes after I walked in the door upon returning from the AWP Conference in Portland, I learned that friend and Mat-Su-based poet Julie LeMay had passed away. She was the latest member of the writing community that we’ve lost over the years.
Jeremy Pataky | Looking Ahead and Behind During #NPM19 Read More »
When I was a teenager, just getting interested in poetry, I acquired a volume of the Collected Poems by Winfield Townley Scott. “Winfield Townley who?” you may ask. In fact, he was a known (maybe not very well-known) writer back then. He’d won the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1939,
John Morgan | Collected Poems Read More »
