writing matters.

This question returns to that posed by Teilo in one of his older posts. Off the top of my head, here are a few possible answers, which obviously overlap in places, followed by short meditations on each of them: - Aesthetic enjoyment - Narcissistic fulfillment - Political/Cultural activism - Community building/Networking Aesthetic enjoyment : Writing for the sake of writing. Producing combinations of words that are beautiful and then sharing those words with others in order to bask in this beauty together. This would include the intention of provoking thought, although perhaps these thoughts would be primarily of an abstract, aesthetic nature. Narcissistic fulfillment See Teilo's post from Oct.18th of last year ( http://bit.ly/kzgnfq ). He noticed that when people go to the website for The Oral Tradition they overwhelmingly spent their time on the submission guidelines page instead of checking out the past and current issues of the magazine. I've noticed this trend wi

It's been awhile since my last post, but now that it's summer I've been reinvigorated to come back to the magazine and the blog. To shake the dust off, I want to give a brief glimpse into the direction The Writers Block is headed: The next issue is going to be a tribute to and exploration of the relationship between handwriting and poetic composition. Until July 1st, the Block is accepting submissions for a poetry-only manuscript issue of handwritten and/or hand-illustrated poems in digitized, scanned, or photographed formats. I'm interested to see what sort of submissions will come in. I've tried to phrase the call specifically enough to communicate clearly what I'm looking for, while leaving it ambiguous enough to ensure a plurality of submissions. The inspiration for the call came out of my research on e-books, and how emerging literary technologies are changing the way we read and experience older printed and hand-written texts. Both print and digitizati