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Remington Roundup: Stay Connected
#Reading, #Writing, & #Listening

1960's photo of woman at Remington typewriterWith winter days and shorter days and the holidays, it’s easy to fall away from our usual reader/writer patterns and find ourselves feeling detached. Here’s your December roundup of links to#reading, #writing, & listening so you can stay connected despite the busy weeks ahead.

#Reading

Looking for your next great book? Kim Suhr debuts her collection of short stories, Nothing to Lose, out from Cornerstone Press this month!

cover image for Nothing to Lose: foggy view of lake from prairie shorelineDrawing on the rich complexity of the American Midwest, Kim Suhr peoples her debut book of fiction with characters that we know, carved out of the Wisconsin landscape and caught between expectation and desire. An Iraq war veteran stalks the streets of Madison. Four drunk friends hunt deer outside Antigo. A mother tries to save her son. A transplanted New Yorker plots revenge against her husband. A man sobers up and opens a paintball range for Jesus. A woman with nothing to lose waits for her first kiss. Personal and powerful, Kim Suhr’s Nothing to Lose shows us a region filled with real people: less than perfect, plagued with doubts, always reaching.

As Director of Red Oak Writing, Kim has championed many a writer across the state of Wisconsin and beyond. I cannot wait to celebrate her own wonderful work during her next reading at Boswell Books on Tuesday, December 11th, 7pm! Read more about her book and watch the trailer.

#Writing

Even if the cold, short days may keep you close to home and out of the writing circles, there are plenty of ways to keep your pen moving and your ties with other storytellers strong. Once a month, I meet online with a group of writers for Study Hall: #AmWriting, where we talk craft, read essays and excerpts from stories, and tackle at least 5 prompts. All in an hour and a half. It’s fast moving and fun. The next meeting is Sunday, January 6th, 3:30pm CST. Register HERE. I’d love to see you!

If you’re looking for a longer structured class experience, Flash Nonfiction I: an introduction opens for registration today. This 4-week course runs from Feb. 3rd-Mar. 2nd, 2019 and is packed with flash nonfiction examples, tips and techniques, and (because I love them so) prompts. Seats are limited in this course, so sign up early! Registration closes Feb 1st.

#Listening

woman facing away from camera, wearing headphonesAs always, story podcasts are my favorite thing to listen to when I need to decompress or am in search of a little inspiration. If you like short fiction, try these:

  1. Levar Burton Reads, “The Best Short Fiction Handpicked by the World’s Greatest Storyteller.” All of the stories are read by Levar Burton himself–a bonus!
  2. The New Yorker podcast, The Writer’s Voice, where you can listen to authors like Zadie Smith and Tommy Orange read their own short stories published in the New Yorker. As you’re running around gathering presents for family and friends, let these two podcasts be the gift to yourself.

Whether you’re reading, writing, or listening, I’m wishing you the best of the season!

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Remington Roundup: #Watch, #Listen, #Learn.

1960's photo of woman at Remington typewriterNow that it’s October and Fall is well under way, we are back into a routine (at our house anyway) of scheduling and schooling. Some of this is formal education, some of it just life. Like navigating through the days, evenings, and weekends of a teenager on the go and mediating the transition of a young girl on her way to pre-teen.

Outside of that excitement, I’m also keeping up with cool finds on the Internet. This month’s Roundup offers links to goodies for lovers of story, whether you enjoy reading them or writing them.

#Watch

Blank on Blank is a collection of animated video interviews from PBS spotlighting celebrities from all corners of creativity and notoriety. Neil Young, Bette Davis, Nora Ephron.

And this one with Stevie Wonder, where he talks about the Keys of Life.

“I’ve never accepted stupidity and ignorance as making me then determine how good I was or how less I was.”

Careful, you’ll get lost in these short videos, but they do make for great lunchtime viewing.

#Listen

Podcasts are still all the rage these days with an endless list of opportunities to subscribe to one or another. It’s tough to choose. If you enjoy listening to stories, LeVar Burton hosts his podcast (which I’ve mentioned before), where he reads short stories for grown-ups.

But there’s another podcast of…tidbits, really. Excerpts from essays and books as read by the author himself, Michael Perry, on his podcast, ReWriting. This episode, “Guitar Girls,” in particular settles in nicely, with five minutes of Happy:

“Life goes better if you have a sense of pitch.”

Fall into more episodes HERE.

#Learn

I bet you didn’t know there is a tiny treasure-trove of free online courses from the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. The IWP regularly offers mass open online courses (MOOC) for writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and now it has packaged several of those past courses into what they call MOOC-PACKS. So former students can revisit the lessons. Or new students to dive into them for the first time. Or, teachers of writing can incorporate them.

MOOC-Pack (mook-pak) n. The core contents of an IWP MOOC, packaged with a guide that explains how to use it to teach a class or lead a study group.

Visit the IWP Distance Learning MOOC-PACK Library for courses like How Writers Write Fiction 2016: Storied Women. In skimming the overview of each, you’ll learn a little about the faculty and glimpse at the list of authors they will spotlight throughout (Naomi Jackson, Margot Livesey, Rebecca Makkai–oh my!).

Closer to home, tune in next Wednesday for a Q&A with Michael Shou-Yung Shum about his debut novel, Queen of Spades (there’s a giveaway!).

And generate a few of your own new stories by signing up for Principles & Prompts, a fun, low-stakes 6-week online writing class aimed at inspiring your muse and keeping your pen busy. Registration ends November 3rd!

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Remington Roundup: #Stories, #SoundBites, & #Spanbauer

IMG_0702-300x300-2The April Roundup is for breaking in a new set of earbuds or million-dollar Beats (depending on your level of fancy-pants), with a handful of picks that will fill your listening card with stories, soundbites, and words of wisdom from author, teacher, and mentor, Tom Spanbauer.

#Stories

woman-girl-technology-musicPodcasts are all the rage these days, so I appreciate a curated list that appeals to my writer/reader self. Bookriot’s recent post on 25 Outstanding Podcasts for Readers includes Storynory, which “brings you a new children’s audio story every week….classic fairy tales, new children’s stories, poems, myths, adventures, and romance” (fun times for kids).

Also listed is The New Yorker Fiction Podcast. I’ve been listening to this one for a while, having heard several episodes on repeat (like the one where “David Sedaris reads Miranda July”).

#SoundBites

food-vegetables-meal-kitchenA website that archives sound bites (for purchase) ranging from traffic noises to chopping vegetables (I’m not kidding!), SOUND SNAP boasts:

“200,000 sound effects and loops. Unlimited possibilities.”

Good stuff for padding a movie or even a podcast with auditory atmosphere, or if you’re creating an audio version of an essay. But this kind of resource, as Joan Dempsey reminds us in her tweet (where I found the link), is also great for writers in the midst of creating a story on paper.

IMG_2311I’ve been known to take long walks in the north woods and record the entire experience from the sound of feet on gravel to the racket of grasshoppers hidden in prairie grass and wildflowers. I keep these recordings as research in case my memory fails when I sit down to revise my novel that is set in the north woods. But I can’t record every sound I might need. So this link is gold.

You can look up anything. And you should! One tiny sound bite may be all you need to rejuvenate an old draft or start a brand new story.

#Spanbauer

So, bookmark those first two links, but get over to this next one right away for a beautiful interview that honors an amazing writer, teacher, and mentor from Portland, Oregon: Tom Spanbauer.

unnamed+copy+2“It’s through the personal…through the people that surround you and how you talk and how you live and how you love each other that will create the art.”
~ Tom Spanbauer

This is a long listen, full of Spanbauer’s own words of wisdom, and it’s as entertaining as it is inspirational. The interview incorporates music as well as tiny love letters from his students; when you reach the end you’ll feel contented, full of love for the work and for the power of community.

What’s on your list of links this month?