How to Write a Story

1. Think of some story you have needed to tell for a long time now.
2. If it’s time, tell it without lying to us, or to yourself.
3. Take us into the place only you know about.
4. Violate a taboo or two along the way.
5. Destroy the deserving. Leave the innocents intact.
6. Insist that we retrieve our childhood awe and wonder.
7. Bring us to our knees with gratitude.
8. Raise us from the dead.
9. Repeat, as often as necessary.
10. Forgive us, if we fail to notice you have done this.

Art credit: Minnie Evans, self-taught, South Carolina

Paperwicket: Indie Animated Shorts for Independent Animated Short Ppl

Whereas every television on earth seems to be spooling images of carnage and catastrophe, I became conscious of all those with little children. I have memories of seeing Johannesburg riots on television when I was little, and it fueled my nightmares for years to come.

So I started PAPERWICKET, a Tumblr of mostly construction paper animation culled from the best of Vimeo.

These look great on an IPad and can be viewed in the car even, on an iPhone in little hands.

Nothin' but the 'toons made by artists with no particular commercial or political agenda in mind. Some are rock music videos; some are student projects from animation classes. More to come.

My criteria for selection? To be included, films must celebrate the human imagination, and must not offer stupid idiotic aggression and cheap po-mo existential angsty-pants paranoia. Must not be tied into some Orwellian corporate lockstep of the obedient purchase of little plastic objects that end up in landfills. Suggestions for more additions to Paperwicket are welcome.

Here's are samples: "Bubblegum" and "Cellegratonia"



Clinic- Bubblegum from trunk animation on Vimeo.

"

Cellegratonia from NEWWORDS on Vimeo.

Decemberists, "Down By the River"

Down By The Water from Miky Wolf on Vimeo.

A Hundred Thousand Starlings:

100,000 starlings fill the skies in Poole - 1 Minute: a Vimeo Project from Mark Rigler on Vimeo.

"Approval Is Like Heroin" --Nina Paley

From Nina Paley's Mimi and Eunice cartoon strip.

Some of Nina's short "minute memes" here, a series of one-minute films about copyright.

Nina Paley's most excellent Sita Sings the Blues is here. And here.

Vernon Fisher. Dreaming Wikileaks Since Before You Were Born.

If you understand the concept of Wikileaks, you will understand the conceptualism of Fort Worth artist Vernon Fisher. Fisher seems to have been dreaming Wikileaks since decades ago.
You still have time to see this exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth before it comes down January 2.
Anthony Mariani gets Vernon Fisher. If you want to get Vernon Fisher, you can see his smart review that appeared in the Fort Worth Weekly.

If you want to write your own short story to accompany this exhibition, go here, to the Modern's website.

Fiction Workshop in Linked Short Stories

Here's the flyer for the advanced fiction workshop I'm teaching at my u. this spring semester:

“A group of linked narratives can create an effect you can’t get from a novel or from one story alone. It’s like a series of snapshots taken over time. Part of the pleasure is turning to them again and again. The interest lies in what has happened in the interstices.” --Michael Chabon



“Linked” short story collections are a perennially popular genre for first-book publication, since they allow the beginning writer to assemble early short compositions into an impressionist whole. You could make the argument that a set of linked short stories, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, midwifed the movement that came to be known as American modernism; the linked story collection has thrived ever since. Most major authors have published at least one work of linked stories, including Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Carlos Fuentes, Munro, John Updike, John Cheever, Louise Erdrich, Robert Olen Butler, and a surprising number of others.

In this advanced creative writing workshop, students will study seven works published as linked narratives or “novels told in stories” and write four linked short stories of their own, using a balance of variables and constants within a short story sequence such as:
-a unifying perspective or narrator,
-a unifying locale or setting, with multiple perspectives
-a common object over various time periods
-multiple narrators with a common bond
-a repeated form, such as letters, documents, official statements, oral histories
-a singular era or event, narrated from various perspectives.

In addition to the collections below, students will read and report on one other linked short story collection of their own choosing, and compose one 3-minute narrative silent film or photo-essay illustrating a particular perspective of “unity” that interests them.

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (online, public domain)
Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner ISBN-13: 978-0307389640
Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff ISBN-13: 9780767928304
Patricia Highsmith, Little Tales of Misogyny ISBN 0-393-32337-4
Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain ISBN-13: 9780140176643
Julie Hecht, Do the Windows Open? ISBN-13: 9780140271454
Ursula LeGuin, Changing Planes ISBN-13: 9780151009718

Note: The list is not meant to be offered as models of "correctness;" the list is meant to be random. The only ones of these I've read so far are Winesburg and Good Scent. The rest I chose because I want to read them. So please don't be spammin' me w/ yr fascist aesthetic emails about what should be on the list because of its superiority, etc., plz.